White Rose Garden
by Chartis
Summary: ...and the world will break them, wielding the early frosts in one hand, but not before they break themselves and tear their petals with their own thorns, and their roots rot and fall off, painlessly, but for that, all the more iniquitously. And in the midst of that frost, it is only each other that they can rely on. After coronation, non-incest Virgil/Vanessa, manga-verse.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: First off, let me set in stone that this fic only follows the manga version of the plot and the characters, which is to say, it disregards the anime completely, as I can't bring myself to agree with their rendition, as well as the novels, simply for their unavailability in good quality where I live. For those of you who haven't read the manga, this basically means no Virgil visiting Bridgett II in her last minutes and no provocative neckline or greenish hair for Vanessa - I won't be speaking for their personalities because I really have no idea if they're much different. I'm pretty sure there is a small wagon of other small discrepancies out there, but eh. I'm clueless here.  
><em>

_Secondly, this is already fully written and complete. I just want to see your reactions to each individual chapter as well as that to the whole piece, so I'll be posting all six (and an amalgam of author's notes) chapters of this over the week, if nothing urgent comes up. Please take a moment to review, if only so that I know my writing didn't leave you indifferent.  
><em>

_Finally, the warnings: language (the kind that should merit an M rating, but it's not that bad, so I'm certain taking liberties), very slight gore (might be disturbing to some, better safe than sorry). I'll warn you if anything else pops up in later chapters; don't really remember now._

_P.S. I'm just wondering: if Metsuselah's bodies stop developing once they awaken, does that mean the brain 'freezes' as well? Not in that they become unable to learn, but that certain aspects, emotion control in particular (which develops until as late as 25 in humans, or so I've heard), never develop fully if the Awakening happens before they can? Because that means... a lot of things, I'm sure you realise. Just a heads-up.  
><em>

_With all that out of the way, I wish that you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this._

* * *

><p><span>Chapter 1. "For Each of Them Held Other Lief and Dear"<span>

_The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer_

Mother Nature has finally lost all its marbles, Vanessa thought as she trudged through ankle-deep snow that piled up faster than the street sweepers could hope to manage. She could hardly see across the street through the milky shroud, only the shops' brightly lit windows discernible as large splatters of colour in the otherwise achromatic scenery, and a curse burst past her lips when a wild gust of wind threw another handful of the chilly substance in her face and invaded the remotely warm confines of her coat. The trench was ill suited for winter as it was, but with this year's temperature going utterly haywire – December through February had seen mild frost at worst, and it seemed as if all that snow that hadn't deigned to make an appearance over the winter was pouring down right now.

It was the beginning of March.

Curse the mad weather.

Every sensible bone in her body was telling her it was not possible to keep braving the storm for that hour and something it would take to reach the palace on any normal day – meaning that it would be more like two hours in the end, and by the time she caught up to Virgil, she wouldn't feel her fingers nearly well enough. Any cab would likewise take ages, and Virgil, ever the sensible one, wouldn't waste time like that; so she dove into the first alley she came across, relishing in the brief electric tingle in her muscles that preceded her slipping into Haste. No matter how careful she was of the oblivious paupers, though, there was snow, too, and no one to clean it, and she cursed again when one pile caught her as high as above the knee.

In the end, thanks to the sporadic use of Haste and the relatively clean embankment of the Thames, she was at the palace gates only half an hour later, shivering and hating the whole big world and irresponsible people with a vengeance. The warm light of the windows promised salvation from all sins and oh, what she wouldn't give for a cup of hot tea, no matter how low the chances of her actually getting some.

"Halt!"

In theory, that was supposed to have been a booming command to instil fear and profess authority, to make it clear to any man with dishonourable intentions that their actions would do nothing to diminish the greatness and valour of the royal family. In practice, it was the croak of a dying crow. The poor guy didn't even cross his rifle across the passage. Frozen solid, huh.

Why hadn't she just scaled the fence? Ah, right. The documents. The bloody documents and the bloody irresponsible people that had her out in a snowstorm.

"State your name and purpose!"

She levelled at the guard a tired glower, but the fire in it died within seconds: she was too weary and cold to fume at the irrationalities of standard protocol at the moment, and the guy couldn't be much better off.

"Like this would stop a well-prepared snooper," she scoffed, and dauntlessly forced her way past the gate, belatedly noting the possibility of her glove sticking to the overcooled iron. "Vanessa Walsh, of the House of Manchester, at your service."

Even the front yard was covered in snow. Oh, joy.

The on-duty shouted something at her back, but the wind drowned out the words and she couldn't care less.

The two maids scurrying about the side entrance halls had exchanged puzzled glances before deeming her unworthy of their attention, and the supposedly snuffed-out ire sparked back to life, joining the efforts of the warm air to thaw her numb cheeks and kindling a different kind of determination into her pace. She didn't care in the slightest by that point if she was scaring off anyone who could have deigned to take her coat and scarf: for one, she would _so _give her brother a piece of her mind if he couldn't be arsed to be thorough to the end. For two, she'd only been to the Queen's office twice, and by complete accident, that, and the fuzziness of her memory was driving her up the wall. She was pretty sure she'd saved enough time for Virgil to still be around, but if not, she was fully prepared to barge in with the damned documents and be done with it and try not to snap at the Queen and strangle Virgil over dinner.

His lucky stars seemed to be out tonight, though.

"Brother!" and he paused, hand on the knob, the door already ajar, features shifting from surprise to confusion, and she broke into a run, the stupid files having ling since migrated from inside the coat into her grasp, the dozen metres to Virgil's side surprisingly easy on her fatigued body – she'd overdone it with Haste after all.

"Vanessa… Why are you here, and in such weather no less?"

Her eye twitched.

"I wouldn't have had to go through all that if you'd bothered to check what you're taking!" she blurted angrily before recalling who she was talking to and genuinely cooling down. "They brought this in when you'd already left, said it was important."

The papers then changed hands, and he hummed quietly as his eyes skimmed the first page. "This could have waited until tomorrow, or the morning at worst," he concluded at last, and she suddenly got a second visit from her earlier urge to strangle someone.

"How was I supposed to know that? I'm a medic, not a pencil-pusher!"

There was a giggle, sudden as the chime of a telephone, and the existence of an open door nearby sprung into the siblings' attention. Beyond it, Queen Esther was unsuccessfully stifling her mirth, and a lump of abashment stirred in Vanessa's throat; it mattered little at the moment that the same queen had once held the blonde at gunpoint, which was against royal decorum if she knew the word. The tittering slipping past her lips was unbecoming as well, but those trailed off after Virgil quietly cleared his throat, caught in the same embarrassment as his sister.

"Come on in, sit down," Esther smiled and reclined in her chair, an unfamiliar to Vanessa expression of content placidity on her face, and suspicions flared. "I would like some company."

"She drink any?" she questioned Virgil in a discreet mumble as the queen snatched a file from her desk and pouted at whatever she saw there, and got in reply a nod towards the edge of said desk, where a dusty bottle stood sentinel over a half-full glass of amber liquid which Esther reached for even as the document was set back down.

"I'd offer you some, but…" she trailed off and shrugged, fortunately aware of the relationship between Methuselah and spirits. Virgil seemed baffled, but not at all uneasy about the whole situation, and Vanessa wondered if he'd dealt with drunken people before, following his lead to the settee.

"It's quite all right," he reassured the woman, standing up briefly to deposit the files in his possession on the desk, where they were ultimately ignored, and returning to his spot not ten seconds later. "If I may inquire, what could be the occasion?"

The Queen sighed, slumped even lower in her chair, grabbed the glass and took the most unladylike swig, her face immediately scrunching up in an awfully caricature-like grimace, "I am officially sick of the High Council. Those guys. I can manage if it's internationals or economics or whatever, but when it comes to you guys, they're like rabid dogs. Been so for some time now. Argh, I'm so tired of them!" she ranted, and Vanessa frowned. She had developed towards the Queen a certain respect when the latter had wholeheartedly promised to work towards the eventual liberation of the ghetto's inhabitants from the underground. Add to that the fact that the Methuselah noble hated the dukes with a passion, and you had yourself a fine instance of rare solidarity. The queen's face adopted a sullen look then, and she spoke, as if with effort, heavy words that refused to melt into the air, "I don't know if I can hold them back much longer. I don't know…"

She sighed once more and looked at the glass in her hand with sudden distaste that had nothing to do with the flavour of the drink, her gloom spreading like a miasma cloud. A few centuries ago, when the Queen of Albion's power had been absolute, it might have worked for her to put her foot down and refuse to give any consent, but should she try that now, the dukes would raise the population faster than you could say 'revolution', not to mention that her barely twenty years of age, coupled with a baby face, didn't give her much credibility with the old men in power. Though Vanessa could pity the girl, her primary concern at the moment, bug and lumpy like a bull in a china shop, was the wellbeing of her people-

A frantic knock at the door broke the tension with one of a different sort, and without waiting for an invitation, a maid barged in, pale and all but shaking.

"Forgive me, Your Majesty," she rasped, out of breath and shocked at her own audacity, "there's been an accident...!"

"What kind of accident?" Esther questioned, sobering up within seconds, and the servant struggled with herself for a moment.

Even though what Vanessa heard didn't seem to concern her directly, there was still too much unsettling ambiguousness about it.

"My Lord the Duke of Bedford has been violently assailed!"

ꕂꕻꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Esther cajoled the information from the terrified maid little by little as the latter led them to the drawing room near the one where the assaulted had been placed: he had apparently suffered an unclear number of stomach wounds and had lost a frightening lot of blood before staggering over to one of the palace guards with the tenacity of a cockroach, having only left the court minutes ago; they brought him in then and sent for the court physician, who would be looking at the man as they spoke, and it was all so, so horrible!

The maid was sent away with recommendations of a nice, calming drink, and their merry company, high-strung and sombre, walked through the doors with all the subtlety of a stormcloud. The congregation camping out in the room consisted of a few of the older and more influential courtiers who had nothing better to do in the evening than hang out at the palace, a couple of stronger-willed maids and a brooding Colonel Spencer, and the nobles rose in the presence of the Queen.

"What's the situation?"

"Lord Somerset is in critical condition, Your Majesty," one of the courtiers provided. "Multiple knife wounds and dramatic blood loss. However, not all of it can be attributed to the wounds," and a dangerous expression crept onto his face. Just as he opened his mouth, though,

"It can be deduced," the colonel cut in, face stern and stonily serious, "from the pattern of the punctures observed on Lord Somerset's neck, that the assailant, or one of them, was a vampire."

Wicked and rather blatant delight spilled across one of the courtiers' face.

Vanessa felt clearly, even through her shock, a crippling disgust and a white-hot desire to rip that barely concealed gloating right off.

That glee over the insinuations of her kind's crime was driving her mad.

Something snatched her hand and held tight.

Virgil.

Slowly but surely, she schooled her face into relative semblance of calm. The hand that had held hers for a moment wasn't shaking, the face of her brother was no paler than usual, and she wondered if he looked what he really felt.

The fury within her still burned, charring the lungs and blistering the dermis.

The nobles' stares burned like branding irons.

"I give up!" rang out as the doors flew open with a grand bang worthy of a king's arrival, and no one was exempt from watching the physician take long strides into the room, the damp towel in his hands working frenetically at the blood staining them; there appeared to be a lot. "It is decidedly beyond my abilities, Majesty! Numerous knife stabs, ha! His abdomen is mincemeat! The intestines-"

"You would do well not to soil Her Majesty's ears with such gruesome details," a duke boomed threateningly, but the doctor all but waved him off; it appeared that propriety was low on his list of priorities at the moment, and the towel was smearing more blood on skin than it was wiping by now.

"Her Majesty is a much stronger woman than all those ladies-in-waiting fainting at the sight of a pricked finger," he shot back assertively, and flashed a shadow of a smile to Esther, who sent back a similarly bleak one.

"My tolerance of blood, especially the verbal account of such, is not a point for concern, duke, however much I appreciate it," she supplied with evidently fake sweetness, but once her attention turned back to the doctor, all the feigned high spirits gave way to business-like seriousness. "What is to become of him?"

"If left untreated, certain death within an hour," he spoke solemnly, and to the queen's pained gaze, added, "and I lack the qualifications, Majesty. I can stitch up a bad gash, but... It would be much too easy for me to do more harm than good."

"Has anyone called for a surgeon?"

"They have, Your Majesty, however, given the weather conditions, I am afraid it should take a couple of hours at best to fetch him."

"And the court surgeon is on leave at the most inopportune moment," Esther mumbled, the faint worry on her face morphing into deep contemplation for the duration of a whole five seconds before her eyes zeroed in on the Methuselah siblings, and the question sounded moments later introduced a brand new sort of tension for the evening: prickly as thorns and just as solid. "Vanessa, weren't you a medical specialist of sorts?"

The woman in question knew full well where this was headed. No matter her respect for the Queen,

"Why the hell should I help someone who wants us dead?" and she saw the noble geezers scowl and Spencer close her eyes as if at peace, and the snow kept piling on the windows, higher and higher-

"Please."

until it fell, vanished from sight, unable to bear its own weight.

The repercussions for refusing to help when one of their own was being basically charged guilty would, with any luck, be only grave.

"I've never even performed an actual surgery on my own," Vanessa argued half-heartedly, mind on the possibility of getting the Methuselah community into even hotter water by screwing up, and apparently, the Terrans were thinking along similar lines.

"You Majesty, it is too much of a risk!" came the well-expected rebuke. "You cannot possibly trust those bloodsuckers enough to let them anywhere near wounded! Hasn't she said so herself? She has no confidence in her skill, and what is to say she will be above deliberate harm?! This is-"

"I trust them," and Esther's voice left no room for argument. "They have pledged their allegiance to the Crown just as you have, and, if I took a guess, around the same time that you did. I am fully responsible for my judgement."

"You Majesty-"

This time, it was Virgil – the kind, compassionate Virgil that couldn't bear the thought of someone who was, for all intents and purposes, little more than an outsider taking responsibility for his brethren for him, but he was cut off as well, lightly and swiftly.

"That's quite all right, Lord Walsh. Vanessa," she turned, and of course, she wasn't '_Miss _Walsh', not even in front of those geezers, "I'm counting on you."

"Yeah," and not 'Yes, Your Majesty', because she was just a tiny bit peeved – the courtiers could glare all they wanted, - but it wasn't the time for sentiments now, and she made for the door in a resolute tempo, barking orders left and right and feeling as in her element as she remembered ever getting. "Get warm water and towels in there, tools too. You," she looked at the physician, "are going to help me."

"I- I don't have the qualifications-" he sputtered, looking pretty disturbed, but when he shot a frantic look at the Queen, she could only offer a helpless, if strained, smile.

"Yes, yes, I've heard that, now move it!"

And like that, in an uncertainty-fuelled flurry of directions, she was gone.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Once everyone had abandoned the modest parlour in favour of other occupations, Virgil was left to his own devices, one on one with an empty room, a dying hearth, and his own thoughts. He was not quite sure why he even stayed: the dominant, rational and calculating, part of his mind told him that no factual harm would befall Vanessa with the Queen present in the palace to let judgement befall any who dared misconduct, and his sister would eventually make her way home, maybe a little worse for wear. Whenever he tried to entertain the notion of going on about his duties as usual, however, the very suggestion felt ridiculous and abnormal. So he stayed, no logical reasoning behind the compulsion-turned-decision, settled himself in the window seat to watch the outside and waited, and waited, and waited.

About three hours later, around the time the sky finally cleared, a servant came in to report that a surgeon had been brought in, feed some firewood to the smouldering flames and, with Virgil's consent, turn off the lights.

The moon was full that night.

Another hour later, he ran out of poems to recount.

He'd seen husbands wait for their wives to give birth, rare as the occasion was in the ghetto: all three or four of them had shown significant restlessness and an inability to concentrate on matters not concerning their rapidly approaching fatherhood. He supposed waiting for a medic to get out of a surgery was different. He didn't suffer from bouts of anxiety or experience general nervousness over the outcome: the only problems that could come – that he could _see _coming – would involve the futures of the whole Underground populace, and if worse came to worse, everyone knew what to do. Though the duke's death would briefly weaken the opposition the Methuselah were facing, it would inevitably and rapidly lead to the end of life as they knew it. So much depended on Vanessa and her skill and luck at the moment, and he was sure she was aware of that, and on her shoulders rested not only one Terran life, but also the livelihoods of a hundred and three brethren and herself. He was sure she'd pull this through. She was his little sister, after all, his dear little Vanessa, who had come to understand the concept of maturity a little too late. But, he supposed he'd taken on her share oversoon.

Dear, dear Vanessa.

The fire had disintegrated into embers once again when the door soughed and quietly slid open, letting Vanessa through. She stopped to close it behind her, the movement weak, listless, he noted as he got closer, and only when his shoes clicked on a spot of lacquered wood not covered by the carpets did she raise her head and seem to notice his presence. A few more moments went by before she fully recognized him, and then, as if relieved from a spine-breaking load, her whole posture appeared to sag, though the only thing drooping were her shoulders; she complied soundlessly as he brought her to the sofa to sit down, and in what little light was left in the room, he saw enough of her countenance to not like it.

"How are you feeling?" he asked quietly, only now recalling the only instance when he'd glimpsed a doctor who had just performed a twelve-hour overnight surgery and the unresponsive, almost catatonic state he'd been in, sitting in the corner of the room with his head resting in his hands like a heavy weight, and looking ostensibly like someone who'd seen the ninth circle of Hell. Of course, unlike that doctor, his sister was a Methuselah, and the conditions were nowhere as dire, but the memory was no less unsettling.

"If he wants to live, he'll live," she replied, and he realized she wasn't in quite a good way, or rather, he had the proof: either she wasn't even hearing him, or her logic was twisting the wrong way, as if after a couple of sleepless days, and she asked, "I've done what I could. Can I sleep now?" in a voice so entreating, not even in her younger years would she have used it. Contrary to the brashness he'd become used to, she was displaying such weakness, and somehow, the fact that only he should be privy to that agreed with the laws of the universe.

"Yes," softly, gently, the last note of a lullaby, and she wearily closed her eyes, head falling into the juncture of his neck and shoulder, body slumping against his, limp as a ragdoll: out like a light, if he allowed himself the words. Carefully, he set his sister down, never bothering to remove her jacket, and sat over the slumbering figure for a while, studying the still-too-prominent paleness of her face.

If his reasonable side begrudged him for this later, he'd use that pallor as an excuse.

His own jacket went off and over her shoulder, and then he was settling onto the sofa himself, with his back turned to the world around, his arms winding around the world in front of him, and he himself would be the shield between the two for now. For now, he would keep silent vigil over her sleep, cradle this brittle being – because all life was brittle, but at the same time resilient – against his chest, and not hesitate to drive off any that intruded on her rest, from whatever incorporeal abode they might come. At this strangely out-of-sorts moment, it was the only relatively familiar course of action.

He didn't even realize he'd dozed off until his eyes caught up to the slightly dimmer lighting from a now-moonless sky and the lifeless fireplace, and his mind – to the faint scratch of doors and shoes upon varnished parquetry. Whoever the unwanted guest was, he wished for them to state their business quickly and by their own incentive, for he felt no compulsion whatsoever to stand up and address them, fearing that his sister would wake; looking at it from this side, he wasn't perfectly sure he wanted _them_ to speak, either. The voice that sounded after an inexplicable brief span of silence, surprisingly, identified their late night visitor as Colonel Mary Spencer, in propria persona.

"You were in luck tonight, Count," she spoke quietly, as if sharing his sentiment, and for a short time, he felt truly grateful to the woman who'd wrecked havoc upon his home not too many years ago. "The prognosis is still uncertain, but the experts appear to bet on the duke living rather than not. However, do not think that the House of Lords will let the matters slide. If my hunch is any worth, you and your people will not be getting out of this so easily."

He didn't know if she was counting on an answer during those seconds of complete silence that followed, but he wasn't going to offer her one, and finally, she continued, drawing the finishing line.

"It's thirty minutes past four in the morning right now. I suggest you leave as soon as the servants are up."

And with the faintest of clicks, her footsteps faded in the hallway.

He was not accustomed to that woman displaying consideration in such manner and proportion, and yet she had been treading lightly for the sake of one sleeping 'vampire' – a 'vampire' whose timely involvement had most likely saved a life earlier that night, admittedly, but a vampire nonetheless. Still, if that piece of advice was nothing more than a rather blatant hint to stop soiling the palace with their presence-

A shuddering intake of breath that came from around his clavicle and was decidedly _not his _almost startled him out of his skin, but within moments the shock was replaced by concern: the colonel's voice must have woken her after all, and he did not particularly like the way her hands were vainly grasping at his waistcoat before finally fisting over nothing. He reassured himself she would have acted if he was suffocating her, but then something solid, most likely her forehead, pressed against the spot below his collarbone, and once, he believed he could make out a hint of a hiccup.

"Those... Those-" she hissed in a low, forcefully subdued voice, and as the words spilled from her lips, intermitted by hitched and ragged breaths, he realized one peculiar and perturbing nuance. "Is it so fucking _difficult_- Ungrateful _bitches_! Don't- look at me like I'm some blasted bloodthirsty animal! Don't look like I'm going to assault you at any moment! Don't accuse me of things I didn't show a hint of doing! That's fucking insulting, dammit!"

He hadn't seen – hadn't been around to see her cry at all through the last several decades.

"Why the fuck d'I even _agree_ to this?! Like his life- will save our case! Sooner or later, they'd have done something anyway, why bother with- this humiliation, but _no_, humiliation is what 'vampires' are worthy of! Fucking Terrans with their shitty loyalty! They'll sell the country as easily as their lifelong friends! They'll sell _us_ cheaper than their carpets!"

Their small community was a prideful bunch, some more than others. They might not show much malcontent about mistreatment, but there was no discrediting the value of the technology they provided, along with the fact of being people, though not quite human. The barbed attitude he received on behalf of a hundred of Methuselah during his relatively rare trips to the court was always aimed well, and his steely composure was not meant for that kind of defence, so he was not unused to stepping on his own throat and being the epitome of politeness despite himself. His sister, on the other hand, in dealings with Terrans was nettly at best, but even if she seemed like a tight, angry bundle of thorns, there were also leaves, and petals too. She'd always been thin-skinned, a hopeless crybaby in her younger years, though he'd missed the moment she grew brambles, preoccupied as he was with his own dethornment, and though she might have wrapped herself in briars, she still hurt. Else, she wouldn't be cursing up a storm right now. Else, she wouldn't be shattering so exquisitely, so splendidly, a myriad of cracks blossoming in an eyeblink. The one closest to him, he couldn't protect from _this_. One should never take familial love for granted, nor was one entitled to love solely upon the basis of blood relation, he'd learned that at his own expense, but her, he loved. Oh, how he loved – the knowledge was almost instinctual in the sentiment's overpowering, overwhelming omnipresence; her pained rage was eating him like acid.

Beloved, beloved Vanessa...

All he could do was keep sentry and try to hold the pieces together.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2. Ex nihilo nihil fit

The fog pervading the crisp pre-sunrise air did not feel particularly heavy as it soaked into his cape, but he felt very vividly every inch of moss that sagged under his feet, and the dew that ferns and rare underbrush left on his shoes made the rims of his trousers stick to the fine leather. Neither the fog nor the copse seemed too thick, but there was no visible end to the bleak scenery, spiced only with countless black-eyed birch trunks sandwiched between two layers of thin moss-green foliage that surrounded him from all sides. He was not searching for an exit, however: the object of his pursuit, something in him insisted, was wandering in the forest as well. Though the name escaped him, he knew with clarity what, or rather, whom he was looking for – the knowledge was almost instinctual.

Another glance around had his gaze snagging on the ends of a pale blond mane, and though it disappeared almost instantly among the scant flora, his feet carried him as confidently as if there was a well-walked path. He knew, though, that even if he ran, there would be no catching up to the blonde: by the time he rounded that tree, nothing would be there to see except for the never-changing fogginess of the grove.

_Look here_

He swivelled to the right, where the voice seemed to have come from. He knew the owner of that voice. He was searching for her, but why wouldn't she come out? Why couldn't he catch up? The questions ricocheted in his skull like rubber balls, yet as he set off in the newly registered direction, his thoughts scattered chaotically and stubbornly escaped his mental grasp.

_Look at me, brother_

He stopped, turned around and even managed to glimpse her back before she tore through a particularly thick copse of underbrush and vanished from sight once more. This queer game of hide-and-seek, markedly his inability to end it, was beginning to grow worrying; the newly added sunlight hitting the ground nearby only amplified the dim apprehension, and the lilt in her voice when she called to him again, like she was going to do something he'd love to see, like a child trying to impress her parents, when he'd turned to look at the hills spreading barely a dozen metres from him, where the border between forest and field lay, and where she stood, that gleeful tone did nothing to soothe the dread.

The sun was rising.

_Watch me, Virgil._

Legs heavier than lead, feet mired in spongy, wet moss, he stood centimetres from the sunlit ground and watched his sister's body slowly, slowly devour itself, corroding until she screamed with pain, and screamed, screamed, screamed…

The ringing in Virgil's ears persisted in the airtight early morning silence that filled his bedroom, drowning out the timid ticking of the tabletop clock and drawing out shadowy spectres from the darker nooks; the lack of light was, in a way, comforting. He usually woke from nightmares in that manner: with precise, all-embracing awareness of a pillow under his head, both heart and breath rate retaining a semi-normal pace, and that particular dream had added many more cases to the statistics.

He was sick of seeing it.

From what he knew about psychology, there had to be a sort of stimulus, internal or otherwise, to fuel the imagery. He supposed the night after the assault incident, when he'd candidly admitted to himself his incompetence in certain matters, was the starting point, but as to where the rest of it came from, he had only a vague understanding. He was well aware of a gap in his generally amiable relationship with Vanessa – a gap of ten-odd years when he'd been tailing his father not unlike a lost puppy and barely had the time to speak two words with her, and a gap he was quietly hoping to mend, for it stood between what seemed like utterly different universes: their current lifestyle as the leader of the Underground Methuselah and his occasional aide, and the first eighteen years of their lives, spent at the small castle back in the county, when they had been all but joined at the hip. He was also aware of the golden film his mind kept casting over memories, but the desire to connect the two so vastly different parts of his life into one undivided concept was, one, simply inarguable, two, just as inarguably hinged on restoring at least a part of the ease that used to pervade their bond like fog before sunrise. That snowy night in March, the damper he kept on his persistent fondness for his sister had been lifted only by the force of highly unusual circumstances, but he had profound doubts that the affectionate gesture would have been accepted had she been in a relatively normal state of mind. The Vanessa from thirty years ago would have left no place for such doubts.

They'd both changed, perhaps too much; for all his wanting to 'mend the gap', he didn't even know where to start.

He could, however, start going back to sleep by washing the dry aftertaste from his mouth.

There were no windows in their quarters, positioned among the former lab rooms as they were, and the weak lights in the hall were always on – even for a Methuselah, by however little their night vision surpassed that of Terrans', seeing without a single light source would prove impossible. There was also always a carafe of water in the great room, and as he slowly emptied the glass, his mind obediently slinked away from fog-shrouded vigilant trees to the more material concerns. The investigation for the perpetrator behind that assault had only given them the fact of a single unauthorized use of the surface door a few hours before the supposed time of the attack, which meant that he had long since left the premises by that moment, but no name came up to go with the figures. The scarceness of population should have made absence of even one person at least somewhat salient, and yet according to the verbal account collected by their police, no one had been reported missing; the possibility of being deliberately misinformed could not be cast off, for all it could mean. There were also a few notorious for skipping work or class for weeks on end and then turning up none the wiser about social obligation, and they were, understandably, the first ones on the list of suspects, but there was no giving to the Londinium police the identities of possibly uninvolved people – that would be very unlikely to end well for them. The city officers had already tried to force their way in, on orders from one of the dukes – orders not sanctioned by Her Majesty, mind, - and he had had to reluctantly divulge some blurred details to the House of Lords to give the impression of progress. Vanessa, too, had been summoned to the meetings a couple of times, but the purposes of those summons ultimately remained unclear: one of the questions had concerned the likelihood of any deliberate damage done by her hand to the currently recuperating duke, and then a lengthy discussion had ensued on the topic of the credibility of her words. He could see that the condescension had cut deep, but could offer little except for a few words aimed to comfort, but dubiously succeeding. She was not fit for fending off vipers within their own nest.

Not until a pale blotch standing out against the dimly lit surroundings registered in the corner of his eye did he take notice of the object of his musings frozen in the doorway, sleep-tousled and disoriented to an extent and clad only in panties and a camisole; however many degrees of familial relations bound them, he couldn't categorize his sister's current attire as anything other than unacceptably shameless, seeing how he'd bothered to tie a dressing gown over his own nightclothes. Vanessa hadn't even let go of the pillow. At least she'd left the blanket be this time.

The second detail he spotted was the deeper-than-normal breaths she took and the slight stiffness of her posture, which left him puzzled and wondering if perhaps she _did _possess some degree of self-consciousness after all, but the idea was dismissed within moments on the grounds of not belonging to this world.

"Brother?"

She appeared to relax a fraction, and he surmised that the surprise he'd unwittingly set up for her was not completely unpleasant.

"What's wrong? It is unlike you to be wandering around during the day," he asked, and, when his only answer was a sideways semi-scowl and subsequent loss of eye contact, followed up with a justified educated guess. "Did you have a bad dream?"

She narrowed her eyes with scoff, in her lurking ingenuousness unable to attempt a lie after being caught, but at least not driving him away with a few choice words, as she would have treated anyone else. "Kinda," she begrudgingly conceded, and patted with her bare feet down to the sofa, eager to escape contact with the cold floors; his eyes roved up the sides of her unsettlingly skinny thighs for the whole of half a second before he tore his sight back towards the glass he was setting down, reminding himself to act like a gentleman and not stare. A nearby armchair proved as good a distraction, and he settled into it with the mannerisms of someone preparing to listen.

"Would you like to tell me about it?" he invited, nothing about his posture suggesting any doubt about the expected answer, and he wasn't quite sure where his sudden boldness had sprung from. If she honestly did not wish to share, he wouldn't press, but he felt that whatever she'd seen, it had been terrifying enough to warrant getting out of bed, which made discussion sound like the preferable option. Nightmares were usually a rare occasion for both of them – usually.

"It was just a dream. Stupid, too," she grumbled, drawing her knees up and crossing her arms over her stomach, and the faint tremor that shook her for a moment did not go unnoticed.

"I promise not to laugh."

She dithered for a few moments before fixing him with a defeated glare and flinging her pillow at his head; with no actual malice behind the attack, it was all too easy to intercept. After a few more seconds of fighting with the words, she finally spoke, calm and even distant, as if it wasn't minutes ago that she'd had all kind of disturbing experiences. "There's… that freaky bloke, with some creepy incantations. And then there's that… creature, thing, I don't know, it was slimy, it had tentacles, and one of them sort of burst my stomach right open, and it was all one big tear-" More and more revulsion seeped into her voice with every words, until she cringed, most likely trying to ignore the phantoms of sensations her mind was gladly providing. "It's all so bloody disgusting, messy, just…"

Silence reigned while she shooed away the disquieting memories and Virgil tried to wrap his head around the concept of waking up from a hole in one's midriff that had intestines dangling from it like sausage links. His own imagination never pulled those kinds of tricks on him while he slept, and that made his suspicions that he had somehow received a heavily edited version all the more solid.

"Was that surgery too much after all?" he sighed at last, more to himself than anything, growing faintly disconcerted that she'd had to go through that, but she'd heard him anyway and bristled almost immediately.

"Who are you taking me for?!" she growled, back to her usual demeanour at once. "I can handle a few yards of intestinal tract just fine! It's just kinda different when it's your own, you know?" she gibed, sarcasm laid on thick, and his swarming concerns reluctantly retreated. The feeling that something was missing from the story, however, did not.

"Is there something else I should know?" he enquired cautiously, fully aware of the degree to which his present curiosity was misplaced, but consideration took second place after the lingering worry that was feeding off some vague details of her expression – he couldn't pinpoint any of those even if he tried his best, and the overall impression was ringing a bell.

"Not really," came the reply, only a modicum too strained to sound convincing, but the simultaneous message of 'Don't pry' was just as clear, and he smiled to show that he would comply with her wishes. Then she livened up a little with a decidedly confusing "Your turn now," and at his raised eyebrows, aimed at him a mildly cross look she usually reserved for thick-headed children. "I told you my dream, now you tell me yours."

A few moments of startled wondering gave way to soft amusement, and the following "How did you know I had a bad dream as well?" brought some genuine befuddlement to her face. Something inside him hoped that she'd come to that conclusion due to still being capable of knowing what was going through his head with very little to go on, but he realised that simple association was much more likely to be the cause, and that made her confusion all the more endearing in his eyes; he caught the urge to plant a kiss on her forehead in time and reeled it back in. In all seriousness, though, this kind of affection was something completely new.

"Lost my way in a forest," he provided without further prompting, still smiling faintly at the contrast between both the dreams themselves and their respective accounts. She didn't need to know the more gory details of his dream, not when the stormy atmosphere appeared to have lifted; her look turned incredulous.

"Seriously? That's it? Jeez, brother, you can be so pathetic at times," she grimaced in good-natured exasperation, and his recent decision made all the more sense. The good mood was worth too much to be ruined right now, and it just might ward off any other phantasms that could decide to continue disturbing her sleep. He started rising to his feet, intending to conclude this on a happy note, when her voice, still bright with curiosity, but somehow also startlingly solemn and subdued, stopped him dead in his tracks. "Virgil... Tell me about father."

For a few seconds, he froze, and then carefully sat back down.

He couldn't have anticipated that. The man had died decades ago, and why she would ask now of all times escaped him. There had always been ground for curiosity – after all, the man had hardly paid his daughter any attention before her abrupt change from skirts to trousers, and even then the distance between the two had remained too great for anything warmer than an occasional reserved 'Good morning'. The one who'd spent most of the time with him was Virgil, hauled along to witness the various complicated proceedings of the Underground, learn, and be properly broken into court conduct, and it made a somewhat sad sort of sense that he would be the obvious choice for extraction of information. Still, he had to wonder if he was the best choice. He might have been shadowing his father for five-odd years, but he'd hardly ever felt like he knew what was going through the man's head. His father, plenty of time as Virgil had spent by his side, had left after himself only a very indistinct image, little to none parental warmth and a small wagon of responsibilities.

He watched her shift slightly in her seat, her eyes maintaining that semi-inquisitive, semi-expectant note, and couldn't for the life of him figure out where his reluctance to narrate stemmed from.

"He was... a very restrained man. A remarkable example of perpetual politeness, but without an ounce of warmth to it, be it his closest subordinate or a higher nobleman. I was no exception, though I suppose he _did _adopt a somewhat colder attitude toward you; but still, as far as I remember, he'd only ever smiled at me once." And not from any particular parental love, either: he'd spoken of the utopia he'd called 'future', of how the two-way discrimination between Methuselah and Terrans would have to give someday, and when Virgil had affirmed that yes, he understood, only then did his father's lips stretch into that amiable, but still hopelessly generic, expressionless 'smile'. "He was idealistic to a fault, too, very zealous about the possibility of coexisting with Terrans," the very idea that had driven him to re-evaluate his admiration of the man that used to run the ghetto with such efficiency, the idea that, in the face of his still so fresh back then childhood experiences - the ventures into the small town by the castle had not gone smoothly even once, - sounded to him ludicrous at best. Vanessa snorted; her memory served her just as well. "He'd nursed plans, solid projects even concerning our gradual integration into the surface population. As far as I know, though, the queen never quite approved, and what small-scale experiments had been conducted all ended rather disastrously.

"Now that I think about it, the late queen, Bridget, was the only one who'd had the pleasure of being acquainted with his warmer demeanour. The few times I'd accompanied him to her office, I caught him smiling at her quite often, and it seems that they used to be on friendly terms, though I am not aware of the extent. He looked at her with that expression..." he slowed down a bit in apprehension of his listener's reaction, but now that he'd begun talking, there was little that could prevent him from getting this off his chest - their father, or rather, failure thereof, had always been a topic evaded and ignored, but there was no use in denying the man's contribution to the way things have become, - "the way Grace would look at us when she thought we wouldn't notice." He'd felt so out of place when he'd realised where his father's parental feelings were channelled, he'd almost hated the woman; fortunately, though, he hadn't considered his father's affections worth hating for, else his respect for the Queen might have suffered a serious blow. For family, the twins had always had each other first and foremost, and their wet-nurse and nanny was a gladly accepted mother figure; perhaps, the continued absence of a father during their pre-Awakening years had been the force behind his relatively painless acceptance of the fact that his father would only grow as close to him as a teacher, at best. He remembered Vanessa being much more excited about meeting the man, though, and wondered idly if the disappointment had born a heavier impact on her – she'd still been such a child, living up to her title of a little sister quite spectacularly for all her being only a few hours younger.

"They say father didn't use to be quite as reserved, that he'd been rather more congenial before our mother's death." The mother that had lost her life in giving them theirs, the mother whose portrait they'd found in the great room on first coming to the Underground, and whose miniature, encased in an intricately decorated locket, had come into Virgil's possession through none other than Her Majesty Bridget, who'd received it from the former Count of Manchester himself shortly before his death. Now it was stored away in Virgil's desk, collecting dust, as he couldn't bring himself to hold much longing for a woman he'd only ever known from pictures – he hadn't even thought to ask the other Underground dwellers what she'd been like. His definition of family just didn't stretch to someone completely missing from his childhood, and neither did Vanessa's, as far as he would guess.

"I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt," Vanessa muttered somewhat glumly in the brief silence that his musings had unwittingly created, and he doubted softly if the aftertaste of this particular tale would allow them to sleep in peace.

"Whatever has brought this question on?" he asked in genuine curiosity, but she only shrugged, a bit tense and covertly evading his eyes; he noticed nonetheless.

"I've just been wondering if..." she squirmed and scowled in some inner conflict, but at last spat, "if he'd always been such an ass" in a normal aggravated voice.

She wasn't fooling his time-honed ability to detect when she wasn't saying what she was thinking, but if she couldn't trust him with it, then that was that. It was far from a pleasant feeling, but that was that. That was the gap.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

When giving voice to her curiosity more than half a day earlier, Vanessa had been hoping for some proof that _that man _ had been an actual living being and not a bizarre cross between man and machine like that thing that was rumoured to be employed by the Vatican. Had the late Lord Walsh possessed at least a sliver of emotion under that stony hide of his, she could have come to terms with the cold the shoulder he'd been giving her for the whole duration of his presence in her life, but Virgil's vague 'They say' was hardly good enough. Still, 'hate' was too strong a word: she just didn't care enough for that. After all, it hadn't been so much her father as the whole goddamn gender-based condescension that had forced her into trousers and jackets. Besides, she did find her current attire convenient for many other purposes.

Such as traversing the ever soggy Londinium with its East End dirt in pursuit of a rendezvous with a very possible murderer who'd thrown the chronic tug-of-war between the House of Lords and the ghetto into a different gear altogether. No, scratch that – he'd basically pleaded guilty in that note. A confirmed murderer- assailant. Right.

Thinking about how the guy who used to be part of the strike force in her former 'gang' – the one that had been planning to hold the pope hostage, that one – couldn't even off one Terran felt self-deprecating, but less so than the fact that he was offing them at all: she'd thoroughly explained to all members that the whole 'violent phase' shebang was over, but it looked like her authority hadn't been enough to hold back the more vengeful ones. Her newly-found appreciation of peace – that disaster of an operation had driven the point home – was not easily shared, and she wasn't even going to try this time. She would, however, be more than happy to know what the actual fuck the bloke had been thinking, as he'd promised to explain himself, and if possible, guilt him into surrendering himself, and then the bloody dukes would be off their backs and Virgil would be cut some slack and she wouldn't have to trudge into those damned meetings on damned mornings every damned week. It was a little more bearable if it was evening – she could stick around for a few minutes and appreciate the opportunity to stargaze in the gardens, - but those times only happened once in a blue moon.

By the time she reached her destination, the ruins at the Kensington Royal Park, the stars had already dimmed to near-invisibility – such a difference from the spectacular display she couldn't help admiring; interesting how it took her half a decade of looking up at the expressionless Underground ceiling to fully realise just what their holed-up populace was missing out on. Common dwellers weren't allowed outside without a heavy reason, better a few, and a bunch of paperwork, by the regulations set by the surface and for the danger of being caught in the sun. The Walsh siblings, understandably, had unlimited permits, as well as the codes, and were counted on to be responsible enough not to overstay their welcome. By the sunrise schedule and her watch, as she spent too little time outside to differentiate sky hues well, Vanessa surmised she had at least a couple of hours – plenty of time to have a not-so-civilised conversation and get home safely. Now if only that duffer would show up.

The Kensington Park, contrary to its name, was little more than a transitory strip between the Buckingham palace gardens and the vast acres of royal forests where the monarchs could indulge in hunting. The grass was regularly trimmed and the underbrush mostly cleared out in favour of some decorative shrubs and flowers, leaving the trees pretty scarce, but that was the extent of it; the paths, though wide and properly coated with gravel, winded in mind-boggling turns that dutifully followed the terrain, and the landscape was dotted with irregularities like waterfalls, gazebos and so on. The 'ruins' were just a bit more authentic: a forgotten pavilion abandoned in the times when money had been tight, now little more than a few faded stone-teeth and a pile of boulders strategically surrounded by rose bushes to blend the picturesque disrepair better with the greenery. Fifteen minutes over the designated meeting time and half an hour after her arrival, Vanessa flopped down on one of the boulders and wrestled with an itching need to break something if her former underling didn't show his bloody mug within the next five minutes. Maybe less. She wasn't used to such tardiness! It was almost an insult. This wasn't some night out in town, damn it!

Of course, he could have just decided on skipping their little get-together. Maybe, he'd done so even before sending that note – which had come no earlier than the previous morning. As far as logic went, it could well be some sort of elaborate trap.

Had she been dealing with a Terran or a complete stranger, she would have entertained the idea.

With the beginnings of boredom joining the festering ire, she absently fingered the roses brushing against her seat, the tender buds barely showing the very tips of pink-tinges white petals. Virgil used to put rose blossoms in her hair, one after another, poking at her head and twisting the stems until the result was 'aesthetically gratifying' and her head felt heavy with half a dozen flowers and the potent smell, and she'd always puzzled over how that young and pretty short-fused Virgil could procure such patience in removing every thorn. Still, he'd been patient with her even before it had been pounded into him as a general rule of conduct.

Vanessa wondered fleetingly if the protectiveness he used to show had gone under the hammer of propriety as well, or if there were simply no fitting circumstances for it to show anymore.

Not that she needed protection, mind.

That was one of the reasons why she'd kept both the incident that had become her nightmare fuel and the note's existence from her brother, who was, by all means, entitled to the latter piece of information. She was fully capable of dealing with one man who wasn't a treacherous Terran ready to put a silver dagger in her back. More than that, though, she didn't want to jostle Virgil for something that could well turn out to be a fluke; last day's conversation made it clear to her that he was no better off than her for his association with their father, and that made all the difference. There was every chance the supposed persecutor just wouldn't turn up for one reason or another, and then she would have worked up not only her already troubled brother, but also probably the better part of those involved in the case, for nothing, and looking incompetent just didn't pay in her position.

For some part, though, she just felt it wasn't his business, despite the obvious logic, and felt guilty for feeling like that.

She really, _really _wanted this whole mess over, however scared of the possible outcome Virgil might be.

Nobody was coming, rose buds swayed with the breeze, tickling her fingers and letting loose tiny droplets of dew, and though Vanessa was pissed off just enough to turn her stupid irresponsible former underling in and be done with it, his reasons and the police's methods of extracting them be damned, she was still drawn into the hypnotizing melody of disturbed foliage. Here, away from Londinium's grime and East End's overpopulation, from the Underground ventilation systems and enclosed space, the air was intoxicatingly fresh, infused with that thin cocktail of scents she could never pick apart, just as how she couldn't analyse and formulate the roots of her indignation with the very existence of an underground ghetto that she could barely call home; there was only a distinct sense of wrongness about living even lower than sewage rats, in many sorts of meanings, and the many-layered wall between her people and _this _was only a part of it. They might not walk under the same sky as Terrans, but they had as good a birthright to it as any other living creature. Not to mention dusk and dawn were still fine for them-

Wait. Dawn?

Specks of molten gold, fragile and treacherously beautiful, trembled upon the dewdrops by her hand.

"Oh shit-"

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

How had it come to this?

No, that was not quite correct. That question he could still answer.

_Why _did it have to come to this?

If somebody could answer that, Virgil seethed, he would be much grateful.

It had been a nice, easy day with nothing to remind him of the guillotine blade hovering over his people's neck and the worst piece of news being someone messing up the sunrise forecast records, up until he was paid a visit by some of the former members of Vanessa's terrorist group and guiltily notified of the noose they'd helped tie, mostly unwittingly, around their ex-leader's neck. He'd had enough mind left to himself not to rush out of the room like a fool, instead gaining a worthy amount of intelligence from his informants: the absolute, driven dedication of The Assailant to removing every obstacle between his brethren and 'normal life', along with his identity and his questionable original intentions of convincing the younger Walsh to take his side. Involved were only a few of the former terrorists, but their testimony had been enough to assure the police that their 'friend' had never been outside. That wasn't the interesting part, though: apparently, they hadn't been the ones to botch the sunrise forecast, them knowing about it was the very thing that had pushed them into revealing their cards.

Which was how, after making sure that yes, Vanessa had left the ghetto that morning, and no, she hadn't raided the UV gel stash he kept at home, he found himself coming up with a new synonym for 'fool' with every breath he took. It had been foolish of her to create that terrorist cell. It had been even more foolish to meet who was essentially a renegade on her own and without warning a single soul. It was rather foolish, though he was loathe to admit, that he was in a state about her safety so, but logic had begun to fail him as of late when her wellbeing was being threatened, and after trying to reason with himself that she could well find cover in a park did nothing to alleviate the strangely familiar pull in his chest, he forewent rationalisation and focused on recalling the shortcuts he could take. Not only was he anxious to confirm Vanessa's safety with his own eyes, there were also the eyes of the waking Londinium trained on him whenever he turned to a wider street, which wouldn't let him resort to Haste as he would like to. His steps faltered regularly anyway, propriety rearing its head every once in a while, because his responsibilities said that his priorities at the moment were too skewed for a leader, that he should be doing something, even though he didn't yet have a clear idea of what exactly, about the freshly uncovered conspiracy, but even as he thought that, it was reinstated that he could do little right now. He wouldn't give the renegade the satisfaction of aborting the investigation, as was doubtlessly the true purpose of this set-up, but the ghetto was in no immediate danger, and any threat coming from the Albion nobles would not be alleviated if the guards found an unescorted Methuselah on the grounds and not in the process of leaving.

Vindication found, Virgil allowed some of his annoyance to take over, the emotion made worse when he figured it would be best to keep a low profile and surreptitiously vault over the fence instead of confronting the sentries and explaining the sheer ridiculousness of their situation. The blackness of her clothing stood out even in the deep shade of a large maple with low-swiping branches, and once she caught sight of him, he reigned in his pace to a moderate tense walk, ignoring the discomfort of walking through the occasional sunlit patch. She rose to her feet, face surprised, stunned even. Virgil tried to keep his own face straight – although there was no one but Vanessa around, it was like second nature, - but she seemed wary anyway.

"Brother-"

"What," he growled through the stone in his throat, "were you thinking?"

She looked at him blankly, as if not quite catching on. Was it that unusual of him to worry? Was she even seeing it instead of taking his words at face value as usual?

"I-"

"How did it even occur to you to jump in unprepared like that? Did you ignore even the possibility of a trap?" The temptation to call her a trusting idiot to her face was overwhelming. "There was no need for you to go at all, much less on your own."

He could imagine her hackles rising as the familiar scowl took place on her face, and for some curious reason, it diminished his own temper to a lukewarm ember, as if one of them growing angry was already plenty of aggression; with the agitation out of the way, relief slipped in through the cracks, and suddenly every imaginary thing that had riled him up seemed rather insignificant.

"Did you expect me to sit on my hands when I could do something to fix this mess?! I can't just stay still and wait for it all to pull us under!"

They had indeed both changed. It had hardly crossed his mind that where he had become a leader, detached and calculating and driving away personal affections automatically, as he'd been taught, she had somehow become strong, had drawn mettle from her ire and pounded it into shape, and where a half of her thorns had grown on their own, the other half was artificial, serving as a defence and a supporting frame all at once; it kept everyone from reaching her, and his leadership kept everyone from reaching him, and the gap, framed with thorns on both sides, was right there, with neither of them knowing how to go about closing it. The new layers the ghetto had cast over them were too much to overcome, and those layers were too essential for them to survive without now.

The epiphany hit him like a freight train. His sister had always preferred action to idleness and acceptance, always burning on the inside with the intensity of a forest fire, always feeling too strongly about all the wrongs of the world regardless of what she decided to do about that; it was her nature as much as his, only unharnessed and constantly out in the open. It was inevitable that she would take action at the prompting of a flimsy seedy note. It was inevitable that she would gather the Underground's most passionate souls in an organisation to fight for what they felt was righting the wrongs. It was inevitable that at least one of those souls wouldn't take too well to disbandment. It was inevitable that they would eventually take action, passionate as they had to be.

The noose had been thrown around their necks long before Virgil had taken over his father's duties, and it only tightened with every jostle they made. Somebody only had to kick the chair from beneath their feet.

It was almost a shame one couldn't strange a Methuselah. But they would be hanged anyway.

"Do you have any idea how worried I was?"

She huffed, somewhat calmer now than moment ago, and gave him a strange, almost sullen look that all but said 'Are you serious?' He wordlessly handed her the vial with UV gel and, after casting a fleeting look over the amount of skin her clothes revealed, unfastened his cloak in order to fix it over her shoulders; her eyes softened at last, retaining only a few thorns that he was used to.

"I'm not saying sorry," she spoke quietly, but clearly, traces of sulking permeating her tone, but he knew she was, the same way she knew he had been worried after all.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Please forgive me this chapter. I only hope you at least get a laugh out of this, because otherwise, disregarding some doubtful character study and development, it doesn't contribute to the main plot at all. Seriously, don't take it too seriously. I just couldn't resist._

* * *

><p><span>Chapter 3. Lull<span>

Summer had come suddenly, in an overweek burst of verdure and a no less dramatic rise of temperatures. The usually temperate Albion spring had ripped apart with the deafening crackle of the first thunderstorm of the year and, overpowered, given way to the sizzling dryness that was now threatening to burn the fresh greenery of the palace grounds right through. Sunlight forced its way mercilessly past the tall windows of a hallway on the gardens' side, painfully strong even in those early morning hours, and the two Methuselah nobles hugged the farther wall as they tramped along it, the man in the lead displaying a little more restraint than his scowling sister, who looked exasperated enough to try punching a hole in the wall, for which the High Council they'd just left was not the last reason. Her brother, on the other hand, while sharing most of her sentiments towards the venomous attitude they'd spent a good hour on the receiving end of – and showing none of it, - was discreetly stewing over a slightly different matter. Her Majesty was doing her best to hold off the dukes' advances, but there was only so much a monarch of Albion could do, and if the attacks on his and Vanessa's – mostly Vanessa's, unfortunately at that as he could hardly do anything to protect her in front of the council - more inconsequential shortcomings kept up, the two of them would be completely discredited by the end of the month; those men could argue until blue in the face on the most superficial of points, defying laws of logic on the fly, and standing his ground against that took entirely too much effort. Virgil's calmness, worn paper-thin by the horrible weather and that disaster of a meeting, was evaporating by the second.

"Rotten bastards," Vanessa hissed, clenched teeth doing little in the way of masking the acidic contempt in her voice; to Virgil, that tone was old news, and he was simply thankful that she'd retained enough professionalism to keep it out of the council room. Unfortunately, though, all that restraint was virtually useless as long as the higher nobles had at least some ground to build those non-sequiturs upon.

"Vanessa," he started, brow furrowing in miffed apprehension, and though he waited, no answer came; at least there was silence on her side, indicating that she probably was listening, as per usual, so he went on, "you shouldn't be so careless with your attire."

A sharp intake of breath, followed by a distinctly choking sound, and then

"What?"

in bemusement mixed half and half with indignation.

"What's wrong with my clothes?"

With a titanic surge of willpower, he held back a heavy sigh; this was already volatile enough.

"For one, they are riddled with holes. One does not march into High Council looking like a guttersnipe."

She made a few scandalised huffs and puffs, but he ploughed on relentlessly, battling with his unwillingness to make accusations and degrade into arguing, but his composure was a hair's breadth from betraying him, and what he was trying to convey could well be important in making the dukes back off, if only a little.

"Nor are trousers and leather jackets supposed to be part of a lady's regular wardrobe, for that matter," was added before she could get half a word in, and this time, he received in reply a hardly stifled nasal hiss of progressively rising temper; he continued while the chance was his. "And it would be prudent of you to manage your hair into something presentable; at least keep it off your shoulders-"

He wanted to add 'next time you happen to be summoned to the court', but Vanessa's patience had finally run dry, and what could have been his saving grace never quite got voiced.

"What does how I look have to do with anything?! Those shiteaters were searching for something to cavil at anyway!"

"Language," he admonished mechanically before launching a counterattack. "That is no excuse to give them a reason on a silver platter. The Underground is in an unfavourable position as it is-"

"_I'm saying_, they would've found a reason whether I dress as they like or not! If not for my clothes, then for the fact that we're Methuselah," she growled, and diluted bitterness, a rare guest of his, glued his mouth shut for his knowing the truth in her words. "Besides, if you want to talk about outrageous dresses so much, just look at that Duchess of Erin and that cleavage! Why don't I see them complaining?"

"The Duchess has royal blood and a title to match, not to mention the weight of Albion's marine forces that she leads. She might have a peculiar reputation, but she also has power and is free to throw her weight around. We, on the other hand, do not have that luxury," he explained, fighting his building ire and hoping against hope and the ungodly heat that his sister would mind his points and reel in those childish accusations of people she better steered clear of. He never even realised the discussion, if he could still call it that, was steadily digressing.

"So it all boils down to your reputation, does it?"

He really should have sensed a landmine within that suddenly tight voice of hers – you'd think he could have developed some kind of intuition after half a century, but perhaps he just didn't socialize with females often enough on topics that didn't concern science or engineering or whatnot.

"For the most part, yes," because in the case of nobility, 'your reputation speaks for you', as his father used to say; only after the words had left his mouth did it dawn on him that what he'd just said swung way too far from the point he'd been trying to make.

Her footsteps stopped, and the silence in his wake screamed in alarm.

He halted as well and turned around.

For a split second, he caught what seemed to be hurt on her face, but that was swept away and hidden under a defiant scowl even quicker, and their eyes locked, his confused and somewhat peeved, hers a glare of heretofore unseen magnitude drenched in desperation and defiance that in as little as a few seconds burst into a formidable instance of obduracy he didn't often see from the usually submissive Vanessa directed at himself.

"Fine!" she barked in a way that clearly said she was not fine with the results of their discussion at all, and stormed away, past him and off down the hall, raising a small breeze with her gait's forcefulness.

He stood there for a minute in puzzlement, trying to figure out whether clothing was really such a sensitive topic for women or the heat had simply messed with her head too much, and to what extent had his sister's temperament contributed, but at last, the problem was deemed helpless, and he set off for the Underground. He could settle it with Vanessa later on; now, there was still work to do before he could call it a day, and he should do well to focus on one thing at a time.

Well, he could certainly try.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Vanessa thought her mind at the moment was very much like a pot of soup – chunks of the recent row with Virgil and bits and pieces of that violin-string-tense council session mixed with the prickly broth of her usual constitution and simmering in residual anger cooled by the warm bath water. She'd dropped into it the minute she arrived, only waiting for as long as it took her to shed her (_'riddled with holes'_) clothes, and watching the tub slowly fill up around her legs had actually provided a degree of calm. The engulfing warmth was soothing, leftover rage seeping out of her pores and into the bath and leaving her uncomfortable with herself – what had she even got so angry about? All right, maybe she'd gone a tiny bit overboard... But Virgil had pulled a good one too, railing at her like that! She was angry – had been angry at him, yes, but somehow, there was a tinge of betrayal to the whole story. She'd thought they were past that indifference, that clash of a desperation to live up to a father's expectations and a mulish rebellion, and the notion that things might still be a little too far from smooth rolled around, getting its greasy sides to leave bitter stains on their usual curtain-soft relationship.

She strode down the hall to her room clad in nothing but a bathrobe – of course, a lady wouldn't traipse communal areas dressed so scantily, but she was hardly a lady in the full sense of the word, - eager to get out of the heavy garment, but once she exchanged it for some underwear, her feet stopped in front of the wardrobe, arms hanging limp. It had been nagging at her ever since Virgil brought the issue to light today, carefully chipping away at the weakest parts of her temper armour, and now that enough time had been given, she was being hopelessly flooded.

Virgil usually said sensible things; maybe she really shouldn't dress like she did...

It wasn't even too much of a love match between her and the tears in her clothing: back when she'd barely discovered the numerous benefits that simply dressing, not to mention behaving, as a man could bring, when she was still new to the Underground and very, very curious, the fabrics shredded seemingly on their own volition, oftentimes without her notice, when her explorations led her past broken fixtures and into acrobatic stretches cotton just wasn't designed to take; still, trousers collected way less dirt than skirts. Her wardrobe had undergone a number of renewals since, but the ever-present carelessness stayed, and by then, the inertial force was in full swing: it was simply too much trouble to have all that fixed. Dresses were a thing of long past, of sunny afternoons and the thrill of ditching studies, and dresses were a practical liability when her brother had her run one errand or the other and 'run' was to be taken literally. She was _not _wearing a dress, period. But at least she could try and keep her clothes in one piece, 'try' being the key word; she'd have to be careful, which would be a challenge, with so foreign a concept and an itch for action, but she'd blame it all on Virgil when her patience could hold no more.

Resolve grasped and steady in her hands, she threw the wardrobe doors open and dithered, momentarily lost in seeking out a starting point. Resolve she might have, but weeding out something intact could just prove much more complicated than what she could have imagined. There was a dress stuffed to one side – she'd only ever worn it once to some kind of ultra-official gathering, the one out of a grand total of two or three that had specially requested both a gown and her attendance, a volatile mix if she knew one; after she managed to walk right over a machine oil spill when something had malfunctioned in the Underground that evening, half the skirt had to go, and the only reason the maid hadn't gotten rid of it could be saving it for domestic wear, which didn't work for the complexity of the fastenings and the smothering tightness of the bodice. Something was strewn across the hangers and gathering a fine layer of dust while at that, but from the looks of it, though relatively tearless, it was mostly blouses, with a couple of nightgowns, of all things – she didn't even wear them, - thrown in; she suspected a couple of those dress shirts might be Virgil's, however they'd found their way into her closet. The major part of the space, though, was predictably dominated by a tangled heap of pants and shirts, with a couple of unaccounted jackets in the mix, and, squelching the budding mortification at the scale of the work cut out for her, into that heap she dove.

The task turned out every inch as troublesome as she'd imagined, frustratingly inefficient, yet simple in its monotony. Whatever was torn went flying over one shoulder or another, landing on random places around the room, and the intact clothing she piled at her knees, having sunk down to the carpet when she'd grown weary of bending over. The sorting was taking longer than appreciated, and for what must've been she first time since coming there, she felt compelled to curse the laundry maid for leaving it to her and Virgil to distribute the clothes between themselves. She'd bet her noble status Virgil's closet was much tidier, too...

Her hand reached into the armoire before her eyes did, and, having nothing left to grab, slowly dropped into her lap. A critical eye set on the top of the assorted pile, she raised a shirt before her for further appraisal – something creamish-coloured, with sleeves a good hand's length too short for her liking, but soft and stretchy.

A minute later, fully dressed, staring into the wardrobe mirror with quiet nostalgia and gritting her teeth, she begrudgingly admitted that she didn't look half bad. Respectable, even, though that remained to be seen. But still – she could live like that. Maybe this slightly unfamiliar person currently hogging the place of her reflection had an easier temper, too.

She was tired, though, tired and sleepy, like a child who'd missed her afternoon nap. The civil war with her own style and wardrobe had added to the fact that it was almost midday, and now nothing seemed more tempting than hiding under the covers and letting them ward off the omnipresent underground coolness. The state of her room, however, begged to differ; she understood full well that the maid would be giving her inconspicuous dirty looks for a month should she leave her room in _that _kind of state for tomorrow, and considering that she had the evening shift with the kids the next day, any early evening clean-up was out of question. Still, as she curled on the edge of the bed and allowed her eyes to slide shut, she couldn't bring it to matter; she'd just take a short nap, do something about the mess and go back to sleep. Easy as pie.

Dimly, she decided a certain apology was probably in order next evening.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Compared to the usual, Virgil was home early. Most of the normal people were asleep by 1 p.m., but something came up every other day that required his attention, be it a dig through the archives for shipment statistics, though that wasn't necessarily his job, or discussing with the morning shift the possibilities of recovering yet another desolate wing of the underground facilities, and it didn't help that his presence had been requested at the urgent council at 7 o'clock the next evening. Still, he'd managed to find the time to placate his restlessness over the mystery of fashion: he'd asked one of the older females around the labs, given the permission to speak freely on request, and was promptly hailed "another hopeless male"; the most explanation he acquired came down to the ultimate inability of men and women to "be on the same wavelength". Thus discouraged from pursuing further clarification, he sought home and rest, but his mind seemed fixed on the happenings of almost an hour prior. Something about it unsettled him endlessly, and he couldn't help but grapple with the thought, with the recollection of that momentous glimpse he'd grasped in Vanessa of a child suddenly slapped by a formerly indulgent parent. As far as he reasoned, that went against his duty to protect and provide her with support; and yet, neither this hypocrisy, nor the relentless dismay their disagreement would bring to his pacifistic mind had occurred to him when the dukes were so eager to prove his incompetence in choosing his aides and supervising the Underground. Fortification was necessary, no weakness allowed, but something kept badgering him that the chosen means of dealing with that had not been quite correct.

It was expectedly quiet when he finally arrived home. Vanessa was rarely, if ever, roused by his advent, sleep as she usually did with the healthy depth of someone who spent too much energy on wearing their heart on their sleeve and trying to conceal that fact. It'd been a good while since he'd figured out her defensive mechanism, and in most cases, the knowledge helped him take the sudden uprising of her temper in stride; they simply had different methods of fighting stress. He only wondered when it was that some of that aggressive shell had begun to bleed inwards. If what she wore had indeed been a mask at some point in time, then the concept could turn out to be rather frightening indeed.

Shoulders free of the cape and the coat, he found himself pausing across from Vanessa's door, his mind going back to the solitary piece of advice he'd managed to garner from the woman he'd questioned earlier in the morning: "suck it up and apologize for _something_"; he'd thought about it and found that he had little to lose, aside from perhaps a part of his dignity, but that, he could bear in front of family. The completely logical assumption that his sister was almost surely asleep by now did nothing to deter his feet, and his fingers flicked across the control panel without any cohesion with his brain, acting on a muscle memory from Lord knew how long ago – inviting oneself into personal space was below everything he'd been taught. The sight that greeted him, however, almost made him laugh and was enough to lighten the weight bearing on him ever since the blasted assault.

In the best Vanessa fashion, the room was a veritable mess. Leaving aside what was usually strewn across the vanity seat, there were clothes lounging in what seemed to be a random pattern all around, leaving him to chuckle in fond exasperation; and in the middle of it all, curled upon the blankets, was the hero of the occasion, enveloped in a quietude he was not used to seeing around her. He carefully set himself down beside the top of her head, not once wishing to disturb, and thought that he should just cover her with something and leave her to sleep in peace - the heating system didn't work too bad in the living quarters, but still, - yet as if transfixed by the tranquility, willpower rendered mush, he found himself rooted to the spot.

He almost jumped from it when Vanessa's eyes opened just a crack and just for a long enough moment to let her head find purchase on his knee.

Though stunned for a moment with the suddenness of the movement, he heard no change in her leisurely breaths, and found familiarity in the position despite the surprise, the kind that inclined him to move a couple of ruffled blond locks out of her eyes and plunge headfirst into recollection. Hadn't he done something similar many decades ago, when, covered in scrapes from falling into a rose bush and with freshly dried tears clinging stubbornly to her cheeks, she'd found him reading under a blossoming pear tree and broken out crying once more trying to tell that a maid had drowned the kittens, and hadn't he, as the more level-headed of the two of them, "such a serious, mature boy", hadn't he been burned by the raging, screaming 'unfair' that unfolded like wisps of poison in his head, but still spoken soothing words and petted the once neatly combed crown until the sobs subsided and even after that, and let her fall asleep with that golden crown perched on his thigh; he'd plucked from her hair a rose bud snagged among the tresses, white petals only barely touching the air, and thought that sleeping calmly like that, with a flower in her hair, she very much reminded him of a doll.

His fingers combed through the pale strands in nostalgic, yet well-remembered motions, the repetitive rhythm lulling him, adding to the fatigue, but the daze scattered with Vanessa's quiet mumble of "Brother, you're messing with my hair again," and then she was rolling over onto her back, clearly awake, eyes open, but still sleep-laden, and some sarcastic part of his mind sniggered that he'd been caught red-handed. Still, for all the bravado put on for the general public, she'd always been rather docile in his hands, he mulled in faint wonder as she remained utterly unfazed by the nature of her pillow, even going so far as to wiggle a little into a more comfortable position. There was puzzlement in his thought, though, born from the foreign intimacy he felt lapping at him, and maybe over those five-odd years, they'd lost something – something that couldn't be gained back in perhaps fifty, or maybe it was only him who'd lost that something, dropped it in his hurry to become the man who could make the right decisions and lead a handful of Methuselah to what prosperity could be achieved hiding under the feet of hundreds of thousands of Terrans. Or, maybe, he'd just been blinded to what had never left his gloved hands.

"Had a tornado hit this house while I wasn't looking?" he gibed without any actual bite to his tone, only now picking up on the barely-there smile that had caught his lips heaven-knows-when, and as he watched her brow furrow in sleep-induced confusion and then relax with understanding, he didn't quite feel like wiping that smile off. For her being his sister, he didn't smile at her nearly enough.

"Bro-" she began, but there was something almost tangible around them – if only he could grasp it – that stopped the word dead in its tracks. "Virgil," she tried again, and though it sounded weak and hesitant and entirely foreign, it rang with that innocent lilt he'd all but forgotten, and it felt like they only need pull a little more, and they'd be twelve again, her doodling in his notebooks and him shamelessly stealing her ribbons, which were few to begin with, to manage his overgrown hair when she took one of his just to spite him, "I'm... sorry. For this morning. I threw too big a fit."

Well, that was unexpected.

On second thought, he supposed that was as out of the realm of ordinary as this very familial fondness they were both currently indulging in. Still, unexpected though it might be, there was little incitement for displeasure on his side, leaving him with a rather awkward feeling of not quite deserving the apology – the conflict had begun with his thoughtless word, after all, and neither did he wish to sour the amiable air by admitting that there was anything to accept apologies for.

"No, that's all right. I might have gone a little far myself," his smile returned, and, peace with conscience made and sound, he set his had to smoothing the mane under his fingers once more, his touch air-light, and watched Vanessa melt back into a drowse. Her eyes had closed, demonstrating both the acceptance of his apology and a general consent with his action.

"You know that it won't lie flat no matter how much you pat it, right?" came suddenly, bearing the obligatory hint of ire, but otherwise perfectly placid in tone, and he paused, uncertain.

"Shall I stop? It _is _high time to retire for the day."

"You can sleep here for all I care! Just," she hesitated and rolled onto her side, curling into herself and hiding what suspiciously resembled a pout in his thigh, and he marvelled at how deeply into childhood they'd sunk that day, "a bit more, okay?"

With a light and fond sigh that sent the message of "I don't know what's gotten into you, but I'll humour you for now", he let his fingers resume their dance, and as her breathing deepened, he pondered how far they'd come from who they used to be, how finding his own comfort in hers could prove convenient, and how he was going to leave the bed without rousing its rightful occupant.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4. Nachtflug

There had been another attack. That was all Vanessa really perceived from the information dump Virgil's secretary unleashed on her. That, and something about him being summoned urgently by Her Majesty. Distantly, not quite grasping the situation yet, she wondered why he hadn't sent for her – they'd been taking those business trips to the court together whenever her presence was asked for, he'd even said it was valuable experience in case something happened to him; she'd even developed a feeling of self-importance, as if her tagging along proved that she was more than a tomboyish sister of a respected leader. She'd even felt a nostalgic brush of admiration, seeing him keep his cool in a room full of stinking Terrans pointing fingers at him.

Then it finally hit her.

There had been another attack.

They wouldn't stop at only pointing fingers now.

Not to make the matters better, The Gutter had proven particularly evasive in the couple of weeks following the Kensington Park incident. Leaving aside the culprit behind the botched sunrise schedule – there was nothing to indicate a visit in the gate logs (but those could be botched, too), and there was no proof against a simple system malfunction, - they knew absolute zilch about the terrorist's whereabouts or future plans. There was way too little data, even with what his former accomplices had provided, to make at least an assumption, but the idea that he might carry on with exterminating the dukes had certainly been there.

Now, as Vanessa mindlessly strayed among the halls of the Underground in an admittedly lame attempt to bring her thoughts to order, she wished they'd paid more mind to it.

She hadn't realised that her feet, put under the control of her subconscious, had brought her to the hall leading outside, until Virgil was suddenly right ahead, having returned not too long ago and not a minute too early – it was well past eleven a.m. last time she checked, - and looking downright haggard and even paler than usual, though the hue of the lights might have thrown her for a loop there. He only raised his eyes at her call, already past the capability to be surprised, and in some weird way, like a gut instinct – it might have been the dank, sickening veil over his look, or the unusual bend of his eyebrows, or the invisible twist of his mouth, or her imagination all along, - she felt he was not right, like a stained glass picture with its colours mixed wildly and uncontrollably, and she only saw that because the inconspicuous aura of a leader that he somehow maintained even when wearing a dressing gown over some nightclothes had fled somewhere, perhaps folded into a pocket for safekeeping, perhaps fallen apart like ash flakes, and all that was left for her to see was her brother who was _not right_, and that just didn't agree with the laws of the universe.

"Vanessa... Good. We are going on a trip," and there was something missing from his voice, calm and collected as always, and yet something, something... And what did he mean by 'we'? 'Trip'? "Please make an announcement; I want everyone lightly packed and ready to depart by dusk. I will be by shortly."

There was a good hive of questions whirring in her head as he strode past, her mumbled assent falling like a stone into a silent pond, but the notion of actually asking those felt alien for once, probably because the person now walking a bit tersely in front of her couldn't be counted on to answer them; the admittedly small rational part of her mind understood that he really could, but there was no saying what state he would plunge into if her deductions got voiced. There was no saying what state _she _would be in, particularly, if she would be able to hold back from becoming The Gutter: Reprised.

And then there was parting at some crossroads and getting some random guy to sound the termination of all production and a general gathering at the plaza from the broadcast room, and being glad that she hadn't actually thought of delivering the news that way (what she had to say was unsettling enough to instigate a panic attack on its own, and what the broadcast did to voices was not only creepy, but gibberish as hell too), and the frazzled faces of the people as they gathered, many torn out of their beds, some more scared than others. She'd opted to do this in person, hoping to do some damage control should her words be received badly – and they would be, without any doubt. The people didn't live in the fear of getting kicked out into the sun every day, that wouldn't be exactly healthy, and that was entirely the leader's duty. Damn. She'd only done this sort of thing once – to a much smaller audience that expected the news, if not outright thirsted for it. Damage control was so outside _her _qualifications, she wanted a towel to wipe her hands with. And a pro to take her place at the moment, which was out of question because Virgil was blatantly unavailable. Actually, even Virgil might be stymied in this situation – an announcement of _this _kind was completely unprecedented.

"Okay, folks," she began as soon as the congregation a foot below her impromptu podium started to resemble an approximate hundred, and was half gratified and half relieved when the faces turned to her displayed no contempt or even mild aggravation, only faint anxiety. In such a small community, it would be no wonder if most of them knew her face at least, but she rarely, if ever, bothered with administrative stuff: the wonder here was how someone as uninvolved was being received so relatively positively. "First of all, don't panic," and the anxiety instantly became much more pronounced. She filed the reaction for future reference. "Nobody is being exiled." She wasn't all that sure about that part, but _something _had to be done. "There has been a bit of trouble with the fugitive – I'm sure you've heard about it, - and now the top brass is spitting mad." She could imagine, really. Virgil had said nothing of the sort, but it seemed like the logical conclusion. "So until it all blows over, we're all going away for a while. Everyone needs to be packed by a little before dusk – so by six in the evening it is. No heavy stuff, just clothes and necessities."

Confused murmurs rose in intensity with every sentence she spoke, and when questions began to be voiced, questions like "Where?" or "How long?" that she couldn't answer, that, she could still handle. All that peeking into her brother's documents had been more out of curiosity than an actual want to learn the way things functioned, but it was certainly proving useful – it had educated her well enough in the ways of evading the responsibility. Really, that was all those people ever did.

"Brother is busy with preparations right now, and he hasn't told me everything, but he'll be round with the details in a bit," she said, feeling a weird kind of adrenaline tingle her spine – she didn't have the foggiest what he was doing, but there was no way around a convenient excuse when dealing with a distressed crowd, however much it went against her straightforward nature. "I know that this is all very short-notice, and that we're all losing a day of sleep, but it wasn't a happy decision on our part, either. Please make sure that everyone who isn't here at the moment gets the message too," her protectiveness butted in unexpectedly, and suddenly her discomfort receded into the background, stubborn determination and loyalty surging to pull her face into a no-nonsense scowl. "We are not leaving anyone behind."

The congregation kept mumbling, notes of apprehension flitting over their heads like disturbed bees, but receded from her pedestal just enough to let her back on the ground. Not a few seconds later, though, the commotion reached the 'agitated' mark once more, and before she could figure anything out over the dozens of heads still swarming the space, her brother's voice filled the air to the very last molecule despite the moderate strength of the sound, steady and nothing if not an anchor in the stormy confusion that the prospects of the 'trip' had rocked up.

There was some strangely fitting familiarity about the way the people reacted to him, some definite trust on their end, and it seemed so much easier for him to explain that he didn't really know how long they would be staying in the Empire, could be anything from a couple of weeks to a few months, and she knew there was nothing really strange about that after all – with only a hundred under you, it was a bit difficult to stay too high above it all, to put it lightly. He was only being a proper leader, something that was simply outside her qualifications and not her cup of tea, that left her out of her depth most of the time. A proper leader, not an hour after coming back like _that_. Like a cracked glass holding together on a wing and a prayer.

He was faking it.

From the moment she heard him start another sentence, she suspected. From the moment she managed to get a clear look at him through the throng, she knew. The conclusion wasn't logical or conscious by any stretch, and yet she'd absorbed the tiny, unnoticeable hints, minuscule details that didn't quite register but were still lumped together into an understanding, almost like intuition, that left her baffled how no one else seemed to notice. He was faking it, and all that cracked glass was still there, and she didn't have a clue what to feel and how to deal. If she'd thought she felt out of her depth speaking to her brother's people, this sort of helplessness was missing a term.

The crowd dispersed eventually, but Virgil stayed there, discussing something with one of the lab guys, and she dithered between apathy, pity and anger, but stalked over anyway, never really deciding what she felt about his fake assertive calmness. He was doing the right thing, he was prioritizing the right way, and she really, really shouldn't have been so irked about it, and she wouldn't hate him, not now, not never, and she ended up blaming the undefined, collective everything for forcing that on him. She wasn't sure he so much as got a whiff of that sentiment during the moment when he took stock of her presence, the Virgil that could read her moods like an open book, and she wanted him to be done with the pretend-normal for the day, because pretence and lies were revolting, and looking at him right now made her sick.

"Virgil," she started, having only a vague inclination to rant him into the ground, but she wasn't given time to get even a word in, because this dimly, politely smiling Virgil was a complete stranger who had too much on the agenda to waste time on trigger-happy siblings. She just wanted her brother back.

"Ah, Vanessa, great timing," he smiled at her for a diplomatic second, and then returned to the exemplary blank concentration she'd spotted from across the plaza. "Would you be so kind as to pack my belongings? I'm afraid I just might not have enough time."

Normally, Virgil would have said _something _about her willingly jumping out of her depth for the sake of that little performance earlier, and perceptive as he was, he'd have realised she hadn't had a clue how she should have gone about that speech thing, and in his trademark kindness probably said something like "Good job" or "You did well" or any other reassuring nonsense; he'd have tipped the formalities away from his face like a mask for a moment, and it would have been another token of kinship dropped along the line. _That, _that last request, was unprecedented and strange and foreboding, because it went against the expected and Virgil was nothing of not a creature of habit. She didn't know what to make of it, and there was only some much time left until _departure_, and it was all such a mess, both close-up and from a distance.

She was afraid for him.

"Sure," she said weakly, suddenly lost and alone in the middle of a tangled, thorny mess, and before she could lose the last of her backbone, he walked away and right into the fray of preparation, saving her from seeing that fake face for another moment.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Afterwards, once the airship hatch had closed, hissing like a wounded beast barricading itself in its den, the memory of the last hours promptly tangled itself into a chaotic pretzel of disjointed scenes and feelings in Vanessa's head. The kids had all but driven her up the wall: those old enough to have a solid understanding of what was going on had, blessedly, stuck by their parents or guardians, but the younger ones, instead of being sleep-deprived and whiny like any normal brat, alternated between bouts of overwhelmed sleepiness, unrestrained excitement and boundless curiosity that had them slipping away from their parents' arms with formidable sneakiness; good thing her position in the rear of the procession made for a clear view of anyone straying off, and there could only be so many escape attempts over the half an hour to the dock field. Half an hour full of uneasy marching and unspent anger at all those Terrans that stared from the adjacent streets with varying degrees of many different emotions, all within the 'neutral-negative' range. The Queen had had the procession's way blocked off from the rest of the city, but that hadn't stopped the Terrans from ogling and whispering among themselves; the way they shut up upon being passed and then resumed their hushed mumbling barely moments after was nothing if not infuriatingly disgusting, and she didn't even have an excuse to lash out: it was nor the time, neither the place for a showdown, no matter what kinds of dirty rumours were leaving their mouths. That had been the last she'd be seeing of them for a while, if she had any luck to spare, and good riddance. Even now, trying to locate her brother on the ship, a year's worth of humiliation was prickling her gut.

Virgil had vanished from sight, not unlike one of those children she'd been shepherding earlier, moments after making sure the people were all on board, and was now proving difficult as all hell to find; she swore he'd never been so much trouble at hide-and-seek back in the day. That in mind, he probably wasn't even doing this on purpose: that uneasy feeling of an error in a computer code she got whenever he made himself prominent had never left, and worry kept churning in the very back of her mind. Its front was on the issue at hand, and she ambled on tired feet across the crowded lounge, people parting before her with curious glances as much as their bags would allow, the kids attempting to snatch her for a game. Her brother was still nowhere to be seen, but by now, she would bet a year's supply of blood that he wasn't anywhere even near the commotion. He had a tendency to seek out quiet places when upset.

One of his aides caught up to her at the stairs, as calm as they got in the midst of this mayhem; she didn't pay it much mind. She didn't normally attract much attention unless it concerned the kids, and this was most likely just accidental.

"Erm... Miss Vanessa," he spoke a bit meekly, and she froze, brain hard at work trying to hurdle at once being addressed as a 'lady' of sorts and being addressed at all when she'd been expecting the opposite.

"What is it?" she turned to face the man, unintended surprise-born hostility seeping into her voice, and witnessed a smidge of anxious discomfort flit across his face. Damn. He'd been sort of fidgety from the beginning, was he afraid of her or something? They didn't ask her opinion often, maybe that was the case.

"The cabin arrangements need to be sorted out," he said, redeeming some of his confidence at wading back into familiar waters; she almost said 'Can't you figure it out yourself?', because if _that _was the average level of competence among his colleagues, she might just be one of the more valuable assets in Virgil's arsenal of assistants, comparatively speaking, but then, everything – the man's pretty poor composure, the pisspoor problem he needed help with – just sort of clicked into place. None of them, understandably, had any sort of experience with this kind of mess, and they all felt as out of their depth as she had last morning, and in a situation where no one had a solid idea of what to actually do, they needed an authority to watch over the whole thing and take at least some responsibility off their shoulders.

She sighed, ribs heavy as if made of steel.

"I'll go get brother," she promised, and, as she turned back to the stairs without waiting for an answer, spotted from the corner of her eyes as momentary confusion on the man's face seemed to vanish with a terse nod.

Upstairs, ignoring the din torrenting over the railing, she strode down the gallery until her eyes caught on a hallway that looked like somewhere Virgil would go; the plush carpets absorbed her footsteps, and with the noise from the lounge steadily lessening and the dim golden light cast by the lamps over the doors slipping like a soap film over the walls, the surreal sensation of crossing into a completely different world only strengthened.

This was definitely somewhere Virgil would go.

The double doors at the end of the hall, their surface smooth and cool to the touch, gave way soundlessly under her hand; she slipped in just as quietly. This lounge was an observation deck, with full-length windows lining one of the walls, and her eyes skipped over the dim crescent moon loitering behind the clouds to settle on the figure hunched over in one of the armchairs facing the sky.

'Bingo' would have sounded nice, but it didn't feel like luck had much to do with this. She'd known, not guessed.

"Brother?" a tentative, scouting venture into swampy territory, from across the room, just to see if he'd react. He didn't.

A multitude of careful, infirmary-visitor steps, until she's an arm's length away, and a "Virgil," later, he actually raised his eyes to her backlit silhouette and just looked, almost emptily, and it creeped her out into saying something, anything to get things on the right track. She was tired, and tired of everything being so _wrong_, and if that was a sickness, she wanted to know how to treat it. "They need your help out there."

She thought she heard a sigh, but there'd been no movement to put with the sound.

"I know," he responded at last and closed his eyes, voice breathless and dull and somehow hollow, and she found herself being torn in two. One part was weary frustration and pride and maybe common sense, a part urging her to yell 'Get yourself together, you wuss!' and beat him into shape, because he was a leader and he had no right to be moping around now when everything was still one big mess.

It had occurred to the other part, which was responding to her tingling sense of hidden trouble, that besides the kids who just didn't know any better, she was about the only one who really called him just Virgil now.

In everyone's eyes, he was Lord Walsh, so close to them, seeing them every other day on some business or another, and they looked at him with such reasonably preposterous expectations from such a small distance, she used to wonder on slow days how he never got squashed under all that weight. But he couldn't afford to, especially not with their father gone for good, not with a hundred lives resting on his shoulders; maybe that was why all that had mellowed him out instead of breaking him, though some of the stubbornness had clearly stayed. She had a feeling that people tended to forget he was younger than most of them, that there didn't exist a metaphorical leader figure bestowed with the knowledge to solve every tiny problem that could crop up. As if there wasn't a person behind all that.

Hadn't she believed the same, until a little while before?

Had he wanted them to believe so?

It must have been heavy, a hundred souls as his responsibility for almost thirty years, where for her, a few hours had been enough for a lifetime. It must have been wearing at him, damage and weakness hidden because it seemed like his first response to hide things and bear it all on his own. It must have hit him the hardest out of them all when the trust he'd put in the Queen's protection gave out and backlashed so violently, leaving so few prospects to lean on and so much pitch-black uncertainty in its wake. And now, left with no support, he was crushing under the weight of all those souls in the dead end he'd led them to.

Sometimes things just went to shit. What was next?

Her knees hurt when they hit the floor in front of his shoes, but that didn't seem to matter with that wild pull under sternum splashing right into her throat and urged her arms up and around his neck in sad, emphatic desperation and loneliness, and a desire to help all her own. She felt like she was handling something brittle and already slightly cracked, the hug clumsy and restrained for not knowing how to handle those things, and her chin hovered over his shoulder, stubbornly refusing to touch down in her silly little show of compassion, loyalty, support, whatever the hell she was actually trying to convey, whatever that stormy sea between her ribs and lungs was; it felt like a small victory when there was a shaky sigh on his part, and the weight of his forehead on her shoulder shouted acceptance, obscenely obvious in the empty room.

It was decided, then.

"It's okay. I'll take care of it." She'd had no idea her voice could sound that supportive and still keep its usual sharp edge. He looked like a depressed child, but wasn't really one: a kiss and a cuddle wouldn't cut it. This was on a whole different level. "I'll... stand by you," and good heavens, did she feel like a corny idiot for a second there, but the sentiment was sincere to the last drop, and the notion was summarily discarded, rules of proper conduct be damned. "And in your stead, if so needed."

No more watching from the sidelines like she could just sit through all the shit going down and leave Virgil alone to it.

He said nothing, but she thought that the fingers digging into her sides were like those of a drowning man clinging to a lifeline, and then that churning sensation in her chest was rushing up in a roaring tidal wave, drowning out all thoughts except one, one that flooded everything in seconds.

_I love you. I love you, I love you, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou..._ until it was a single messy note, like the murmury grumble of the sea, growing larger than her body could contain.

It felt familiar, like putting a name to an often-seen face. She didn't have the foggiest where the realisation had come from or if the feeling was the same one that had her declaring her love for her nanny when she'd been five. This- This felt way too strong, and way too clear, and she simply knew and couldn't help trying to reach out with everything from limbs to thoughts, and all that pulling energy coursed frantically along the circuit of her arms and through her heart and left intangible tenseness in its wake to seep into every last bit of some ethereal substance filling her body to the brim. His head was heavy on her shoulder, and he needed her, and she felt invincible and omnipotent and the whole big world was at her feet.

For him, she could take on the world.

She walked back with a powerful, unthwartable gait, plunging steadfastly into the clamour, and had her mind halted in its determination for just a moment, she would have felt something like wings stretching skyward behind her back. Something like freedom. Like the ultimate trick of the mind.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

"Is everything all right?"

Virgil felt somewhat lucky to have run into an assistant of his not two steps onto the gallery; the sooner he got back on track, the better. Giving in to emotion and exhaustion was a shame like no other.

"Yes, sir, everything's been sorted out," the man responded, relaxed to an acceptable extent, and at Virgil's inquisitive look, elaborated. "Miss Vanessa took over after we'd filled her in on the situation, and it's worked out well enough."

He then dismissed the man with his rather obvious sugar-coating, some blatant relief humming in the back of his mind, and leaned on his elbows upon the railing, distractedly watching the scarcely populated lounge below.

He couldn't say he wasn't surprised: he'd hardly given Vanessa a few minutes, but she'd proved unexpectedly competent, not that he'd known her to dislike ordering people around. Nonetheless, those few minutes had seen rather high level of efficiency from his brain as well, compared to the sluggish state it had fallen into. That staggering, liberating and utterly exhilarating realisation that _he was not alone_ had done well to shock it into activity, albeit it had gone in frenzied circles for a full minute with Vanessa's declaration at the axis; by the time he'd wrapped his mind around it, she'd already gone off, and he could almost hear her barking directions in the lounge.

She'd never expressed a particular desire to get involved in the ghetto's administrative business before, and yet here she was now, sharing his burden. Perhaps he was still missing something; perhaps they weren't quite on the same wavelength yet. But she was so much more under his wing now, and by legitimate reason as well if she was going to make good on that promise, and it was ridiculous that they needed reasons at all, both of them way too prideful and stubborn to make for easy contact so far into adulthood. It would get better, though: if she'd managed to step on that, it should've been nothing he couldn't do. They had time; she'd promised to stay by his side, after all.

The gratitude, coupled with fatigue, was threatening to make him dizzy.

He heard the children before he saw her, popping out from a hallway downstairs with her 'flock' floundering around her legs and messing with her footing, balancing made even more challenging by one of the smaller children getting the ride of honour on her shoulders. The youngsters easily rivalled an emergency alarm in loudness, to his amusement, but he still caught snippets of her voice, the uncommonly cheerful tone reserved for her charges, as she made her way across the room, and he remembered the grin she used to wear from their childhood and its happier moments.

He wished she could smile more often.

Right now, though, when she laughed with the children and gave offhand directions without missing a beat when prompted, she was blossoming, so exquisitely, so splendidly, a myriad of petals spread in all their brilliant glory, and though he'd bloomed much too early to ever boast that snow-white, life-warm brilliance, not something for an underdeveloped, chill-bitten flower opening on the taunt of fake sunlight, her timing couldn't have been more perfect. He hadn't been born a great leader and neither had she, and they could only make it work so well, but, perhaps, she would have an easier time.

The girl on his sister's shoulders pointed him out, and Vanessa looked up at him and smiled just a little wider.

He could only smile back and stoically, like a true knight should, count the necrosis blotches on prematurely opened petals.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5. Goodnight Babylonia

The delegation meeting them at the docks was a bit too posh to honour a handful of Albion refugees, he thought: a number of guards in what looked like full formal attire lined up on both sides of what sounded like a few quite important government figures; lack of cultural awareness certainly wasn't helping the evaluation. He could definitely not see a reason for the Empire to go out of its way for their arrival, but then again, he might well be overestimating his importance while unaware of some custom or another. Nevertheless, they were the guests being kindly given refuge, approximate visit duration escaping estimation, so he bowed to the somewhat cattishly smiling woman at the head of the 'welcoming committee' before actual greetings could be exchanged; he consciously didn't dip too low. He could only hope that Vanessa followed his example.

"We of the New Human Empire, in the name of Her Imperial Majesty Augusta Vladica, welcome you and your people as our brothers and sisters in blood," the cat-like woman said, voice sweet and melodious, and gestured to her heart with a fluid, languid motion; he noted that as one more cultural peculiarity he would have to look up.

Imperial speech was really rather surprisingly similar in some aspects to an archaic Albion tongue with an elevated vocabulary dating back almost a millennium, and that made it delightfully easy to grasp: the grammar was remarkable in its likeness, and even some of the pronouns outright matched, though others certainly did not, and word order could be perplexingly confusing. Every dweller of the Underground was taught to speak Imperial with at least a passing fluency, for an occasion like this one.

"On behalf of my brethren and myself, I express our utmost gratitude for your benevolence in response to our plight." That was the extent of the lines they were supposed to follow; but while the woman was most likely also aware of Her Majesty Queen Esther's hand in the matter, he was genuinely thankful that they hadn't been turned away at the doorstep. As it was, the next preferable option had been vagrancy.

The stricter formalities properly enacted, he could raise his head from the uncomfortably lengthy bow that didn't quite accommodate his dignity to be greeted by a smile that had somehow eased from court stiffness into mellow amiability. It should be easier now. "Virgil Walsh, count of Manchester," he crossed a hand across his chest in introduction and limited this bow to a respectful incline of his head, "and my sister and indispensable assistant, Vanessa." The same hand went down and to the side, directing the attention towards his sibling, and he chanced a glance at her out of the corner of his eye; going by the discreet twitching of her lip, she was very obviously fighting down the blush brought about by unexpected praise – which was, in all actuality, more of a cross between wishful thinking and legit plans – and hardly managing a proper bow. He held back a cringe, but thankfully, the cattish Imperial delegate didn't appear to mind.

"Mirka Fortuna, duchess of Moldova and Chief Privy Counsellor," she said simply, elegantly maintaining her offhand friendliness and stretching her smile just a little wider, eyes twinkling as if with poorly concealed entertainment, "and by extension, your host for however long you might stay. But everything shall be discussed soon enough. For now, please, Her Majesty the Empress is waiting to speak with you."

After that, it was all a bit of a blur in his head. Vanessa had almost stayed behind to function as an authority figure for their temporarily headless people, only stopped by the duchess' assurances and the prospect of being left alone to seek out Mirka's manor in an unknown city. The talk with the Empress, unhurried as seemed to be the custom here, had been the most curious affair, discussing through a curtain and a voice modifier the lodgings and provision for a hundred Methuselah that had dropped upon the mysterious Empress' head out of the blue; for all the abruptness of the arrangement, she had received them quite warmly, following the trend from earlier in the night with a lack of a discontented air about her, at the very least. There was, apparently, also a reception to be held for them in a few days' time: one part of it more like an extension of an urban festival of an already stupendous scale, the other a more private and, consequently, more high-class business to be attended by the Empress herself, which, judging by Lady Fortuna's reaction, was quite the honour. The conversation left Virgil floating musingly in a limbo between glad acceptance of their fortunes and a discomforting impression of the receiving side trying rather too hard, for what good the approval of several foreigners, albeit Methuselah, could do them.

The very experience of being thrust into a completely different setting, world even, with its whirlwind of southernly bright colours and unfamiliar shapes, had very easily thrown Virgil right out of his comfort zone, drawing upon his ignorance to call forth childish confusion and a thousand and one questions. The analogies made for a keen sensation of surreality that had never bothered him on his trips across the continent. Vanessa was no better, drinking in the sights, the unrelenting hum of rapid foreign speech and the unhealthy for their Albion-acclimatised lungs odorous and salt-soaked humidity in wide-eyed wonder. She didn't seem unsettled in the slightest, only eager to wander off into the streets and meander about until exhaustion got the better of her, as he'd seen her come close to going through with in the few cities they'd been to that could boast a substantial Methuselah population; strangely enough, he wasn't feeling particularly disturbed either, if only out of place, a reaction he supposed would recede given some time.

A little later, when the meal congenially set out on the still amiable Lady Fortuna's orders for the "fatigued travellers" had long been consumed, it became quite clear to him that trying to sleep through the obnoxiously loud nighttime tropical wildlife in the gardens was an exercise in naivety.

The next morning was a morning in the most nostalgic sense, one filled to the brim with gentle sun and natural light that had kept him terrified for a few confused seconds upon his waking. Shock, however muted by the force of logic, came in stages: his windows, thankfully, faced the west, but he was still mildly confounded by the brightness of the sitting room he'd been directed to, and his eyes kept bothering him for the better part of the day, reminding him of the true dimness they had all been living in not a few days prior. The climate only reluctantly agreed to cooperate as well, and he took to tying his hair up in a ponytail to attempt an escape from the sweltering July heat; Vanessa seemed in no less pain about the inconveniences of her own mane, but vehemently resisted any encouragement to follow his example despite regularly threatening to "crop it the hell off". She did, however, apply scissors to her trousers, as became evident when there was quite little of them covering her legs the following day; she claimed it was fashioned after something she'd glimpsed in some shops during their excursion downtown. His Albion upbringing set him slightly on edge every time all that skin came into view, but neither could he blame her for not braving the temperatures, nor did anyone in the manor look twice, though whether that was a genuine response or something done out of politeness, he still couldn't be sure.

He was leaning towards the former supposition: Lady Fortuna was being a perfectly cordial host if he knew one without even coming close to the bootlicking he'd observed plenty of times at the Albion court, not that he should have suspected someone with a rather decent title and a valuable position in the government to stoop so low. The Empress had given her a leave until the welcoming party, and she used that time to get then briefly acquainted with the nobles' quarters of the city, although she did nothing to conceal her own delight at strolling down the streets. She even took – or rather, forcibly brought Vanessa to shop for more Imperial fashion-consistent clothing, as opposed to their slightly uncomfortably eye-catching Albion garb, unreasonably eager to spend the state's money in what seemed like unreasonable quantities; he'd sagely traded his invitation for an opportunity to peruse a book on Imperial customs strategically placed in the guest bedroom he occupied, and the wisdom in his decision proved itself when Vanessa tumbled into his room at some moment late in the evening and all but collapsed on the settee, half into his lap, moaning "Never again" in the most pitiful voice he'd heard her use. He chuckled at her antics, almost laughed, and she stared at him for a bit in a mix of shock and betrayal before storming off to sulk on his bed, where, to his further amusement, she ended up falling asleep. He didn't have the heart to kick her out; he reasoned with himself that the bed was more than big enough to accommodate them both and then some, and that he definitely wasn't going soft.

Laughing had felt unfamiliarly easy, and he didn't have the slightest notion what could have been the reason for that change.

He woke twice: first in the dead of the unexpectedly chilly night as it was grabbing at him with fingers of cold air through the open windows, and his sister, still in the clutches of sleep, chose that moment to recognise his body as a convenient heat source; second and last, when her hand smacked him on the nose as she rolled over on the other side of the bed, and the predawn greyness pointed out to him that he hadn't had that dream for a good few days, which was almost an improvement.

The hand was retracted before he could take his complaints beyond the initial grunt.

"S'rry 'bout that," she mumbled sleepily, voice muffled as if by a pillow, and he rolled his head towards her, meeting one half-open blue eye and gradually dismissing the confusion of the abrupt awakening. "I fell asleep." She blinked, the visible eye opening a margin wider, as if she only now realised the fact.

Pointing out the obviousness in her statement seemed not worth the trouble, and he remarked instead, "For such a bony thing, your arm weighs quite a lot."

She glared at him, then rolled over, brandishing the crease lines embellished on the side of her face.

"I want to go see how everyone's doing."

And that was how several hours later, Virgil found himself by an apartment block on the Terran side of the city, the one where the former Underground dwellers were lodged on short notice. He felt disgustingly guilty for not having come sooner, and Vanessa appeared to share the sentiment to a certain extent, but to his surprise, they were greeted almost like long-lost relatives. The Imperial officials had done their job well, it seemed, seeing as how no one was rushing up to file a complaint.

They stood side by side, each having chatted with their fair share of holiday-mood subjects, he trying to wrap his head around the fact that everything seemed to be going smoothly so far, she, watching the children play in the dimmed sun with a habitually vigilant eye, and nobles-Methuselah and commoners-Terrans of the city were a perfectly mixed beehive buzzing around them.

"Terran kids are different from ours, did you know? They can be so unreasonably cruel," she said, voice flat, and it only now occurred to him that there were some distinctly short-fanged individuals mixed in with the playing crowd. Their presence was perfectly reasonable, and though the younger ghetto children didn't know a word of the Imperial tongue, the game was going smoothly. "And yet, they're getting along just fine, despite the language barrier and everything."

Why couldn't the adults do the same, really?

"We had quite a fine relationship with the inhabitants of the East End."

"We're adults, and that was only symbiosis, as simple as that," she shook her head, sending him a distracted glare for being slow, no doubt, and then her face adopted a remotely distraught look. "The one time I lost sight of the kids in the city..."

She'd said once that all children were essentially the same: all of them curious, and all of them clueless to the harm they can do. She'd still drawn a fine line between the two species, still believed they were essentially different – beyond the obvious biological peculiarities – in some ways that might or might not be inborn.

"Are these ones different or what? I don't get it, Virgil."

Now, all her beliefs were being thoroughly shaken.

He should have expected no less from a city with such a Methuselah to Terran ratio.

The game came to a gradual close, and the children – _their _children, now that there was a need to distinguish – noticed the two of them almost immediately, running towards them with their names on the lips, even the older ones, who must have already been lectured on the use of titles. Vanessa smiled at them, in that thoughtlessly happy, utterly contagious manner that she only ever graced the younglings with. That he had unexpectedly got slammed in the face with back on the airship. For some cruel reason, it was only now, away from home, in foreign land and on alien soil, that he was truly seeing that smile.

He wished she could smile like that more often, but she was smiling now, his people were... content, for lack of a better word, and that should really be quite enough.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

The portended reception ball came upon them that very evening with a hailstorm of frantic preparations and dress code nuances made all the more perplexing by their ambiguous status: they could ignore the colour regulations as long as no offense was done to the Empress personally, on the basis of being citizens of another state, and yet that would most certainly attract undue and unwelcome attention. There were few options, though, and he supposed it equalled out in the end, his Western-cut suit, the only one Vanessa had had the sense of mind to pack, and her brand-new midnight blue gown that flared out right below her hips in soft, slanted and distinctly non-Albionesque folds. How the combined forces of Lady Fortuna and her maids had managed to wrestle her into that, and then the gloves and the silk choker, probably paled in comparison to what effort must have gone into putting her hair at least partly up and actually making it look elegant, but in the end, that was the most feminine he'd seen her in so many years, and going by the blush, she was well aware of the fact. That was his sister, but not quite, and he was clinging to reality by a hair.

He wasn't even much surprised beyond inquisitive contemplation when the lights in the ballroom dimmed after the Empress' festive spiel and the dazzlingly bright moonlight waterfalling through the disfigured glass taking up the better part of the ceiling became the main source of illumination. Everything, the remaining lamps included, was tinted cerulean, the shadows deep as they'd never been in an Albion ballroom, but the music, for some reason, was ringing a bell, familiar metres performed with unfamiliar instruments, along with a piano, whose keys his fingers hadn't touched since adolescence. He sighed, and his tether to reality (or was it the compulsory tension that came with the job?) gave with a soft ping. It was a good night, an untroubled night, a night soaked with welcome ghosts of childhood affections, though nanny Grace and old Jeremy's absence in this world tasted vaguely bittersweet. A good night.

Or not.

Blood running cold, he regretted with all he had stepping away from Vanessa.

He'd tensed when a posh nobleman executed a well-timed move to her side, and deduced from her reddened face, which burned through everything the cool-coloured light had to offer, the nature of the man's advances. He'd confess to having no particular love from the start for anyone flirting with his little sister, never mind the fact that he was hardly a few hours older, but that twinge of hostility had lasted a grand total of a few seconds before _horror _consumed every coherent thought. The man must have said something very, very wrong, or have been misunderstood, Virgil wouldn't guess. Rage twisted her face into a familiar expression, and he hated at the moment that he knew that side of hers so well: before he could blink, she would rip all that hair cascading down her spine out of the pins and stick them into her offender's eyes before twisting his head right off, and since there was not a single chance of them surreptitiously smuggling the body out, it would probably start a bloody war, and there would be so, _so _much trouble...

A piece of marble balustrade she was leaning against crumbled under her hand, the sound drowned out by the music; Virgil resigned himself to weathering a large-scale diplomatic conflict.

He wasn't even relieved, only stumped, when a few hissed words from her had the unlucky admirer retreat with formidable haste.

"Making progress with your tempter, I see," he smiled wanly, relief finally settling in when Vanessa was safely by his side once again, and she wrestled the slipping embarrassment into submission with a huff.

"Well, I have to live up to..." she trailed off, suddenly sheepish, and then it all made sense.

_I'll stand by you._

He was already acquainted with this mind-sweeping gratitude that made his windpipe swell with poor-fitting, inadequate words that did not do it justice in the slightest. The unusual part was the recognition that the gap between them, the almost polite distance brought about by a sudden difference in social status and years of all but nonexistent communication despite living in the same quarters, was no more and had been so for quite the time; it had crept up on him until it was standing just behind his shoulder, and he only had to turn around and see.

They were on the same ground now, and that made the world right. They'd pull through everything else.

It was a good night.

"Let's dance."

Why did the idea not feel quite as preposterous as it always had? He'd hardly ever entertained the notion since taking charge of the Underground, there were so many things to worry about, and most of them not even novel enough to warrant special speculation: this time, would the venture the East End for donations go without complications? This time, would the dukes raise another controversial matter in hopes of eradicating the 'vipers' nest', how they had so hypocritically and unacceptably poetically name the ghetto? Here, in the realm of calm blues and friendly mutterings, so unlike the pointy stares of the Albion court, was no place for those kinds of questions. And so unlike before, he would not have to handle those questions with only himself to rely on anymore; the unpleasant tang of selfishness went unheeded. He didn't want to bring his dear Vanessa into the rotten mess of being on top of the Underground's administrative chain, but now was not the time, nor was here the place for worry.

She stared at him in surprise, eyes wide, her heart on her absent sleeve as usual, and he shushed the derision he felt for himself in knowing that this ingenuousness would have to be forfeited if she wanted to stay by his side through all of it.

"Wha-"

"I know the piece they are playing," he said, catching her hand and moving around her to execute a meaningless invitation bow, her hand already in his; he made sure not to hold it too tight. He felt as if something was crackling in his blood, and the smile, though no stronger, somehow seemed more solid. "I'm sure you know it as well, there's nothing to fear."

And he tugged, gently, still considerate enough to leave her a way out – she was Vanessa, after all, and dancing was just silly; but she stepped with him without taking so much as a moment to think, her trust blatant despite her face betraying the doubt and incredulousness at him being so unfamiliarly casual.

"I haven't danced in decades," she protested even as the moonlight from above the dance floor fell like water on their shoulders, but it sounded weak over the hint of laughter permeating her voice.

"We'll be fine."

He supposed they made quite the picture: same height, same hair colour, a slightly blurry blotch of black, blue and moon-bleached cornsilk flitting like a bubble in a sealed bottle amidst the blacks, blues and moon-bleach spilled across the floor. Dancing with Vanessa was surprisingly easy, once her death grip on his arms relaxed a little, and he could attribute the fact to anything from their slightly dusty skills that had never quite rusted to the simplicity of that particular figure. They used to prance on each other's toes like that was the proper way back at the lessons, their teacher having very soon tired of tutting every time they did, and sometimes she'd even attack his feet on purpose when it got boring or awkward enough with one of them forced to lead the other. The very concept of unconditional submission had always had her raise her hackles; she needed a reason, and something as ambiguous as custom didn't equate one.

She didn't really need one now, did she?

The roofed terrace of the small inner garden was blessedly empty, and they retreated there once the moon had ceased illuminating the room and the lights had come back on; the dancing had mostly devolved into socialising, and though they should probably play the polite guests and be inside for that part of the night, he couldn't help feeling like an intruder on a familial get-together, however little incentive there might be for that line of thought. In the end, they were little more than strangers of honour, and the magic of a few nostalgic notes had lifted to reveal the simple 'not home'. Home was a labyrinth of steel boxes where the majority of the people didn't see the sky for ages on end, and yet the ties were still strong.

"You can actually see the stars through the UV screen. I hadn't noticed til' now," she mused quietly, arms folded upon the balustrade, and he followed her gaze. He couldn't quite appreciate nature with his mostly logic-driven mind the way Vanessa did, as something more than a reminder – a beautiful reminder, surely – of the time when she'd roused him in the middle of the night to show him the sky that had hypnotized her for a good few minutes. He doubted he could ever appreciate the bloody nocturnal birds serenading by his window; when he wasn't trying to sleep, though, which was still difficult to do during the night, he could... tolerate.

The irrigation system came on with a subtle sputtering hiss, and water began raining thinly from above, where sprinklers must have been embedded into the overhang. Vanessa started a little, but didn't falter in her stargazing, and he took one more glance at the clear sky from underneath the watery curtain. His homesickness on such a night felt very much like a sudden cold sun shower.

He wished to have the option to go home.

He supposed that would be asking for too much; he wished too much, anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6. Cineri Gloria Cera Est

"I just want to make it perfectly clear that you can stay if you wish so. Her Highness Vladica has expressed her readiness to welcome every last one of you as permanent residents..."

That she had, to Virgil as well, in a rather comical and not very formal meeting that had ended not an hour earlier and in which she'd basically admitted, with a good pinch of self-directed wry humour, to having hoped to win them over for the sake of a rejuvenation project she was eager to upscale, but was woefully short on manpower to do so. Lady Fortuna had received corresponding orders, and the fact was still fluttering somewhat sourly in the back of his mind: the duchess could be intimidating despite the sweet smile she wore even when – especially when - something sinister was brewing in her mind, but her overall sunny disposition left her difficult to honestly dislike. He couldn't help but wonder just how much of that had been a facade.

"In fact, I highly advise that you stay. The choice is still yours, but..." the hologram trailed off and shook her head slowly, almost tiredly. It must have been tough on the young monarch to lose ground so rapidly, and with such devastating consequences, no less. "I cannot express how terribly sorry I am for this development."

He closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath.

It was not impossible for him to follow the dukes' logic in this one case, as they were, for once, being quite sensible. Still, even if they could predict the role Vanessa would be taking, none of them would be prepared for her to be just as stubborn as him, if not even more so. The people would be safe, and that was the most important thing. Vanessa would have to put in plenty of effort, but if he knew anything at all about his brethren, she would not be without help-

That thought must not be finished.

"We shall leave tomorrow morning," he spoke at last, eyes opening to regard Queen Esther's pained face. She understood as well as he did the implications of them choosing to reside in the Empire, and the last thing he wished for was to see Albion, his home, fall into the control of a random power-hungry state.

The heavy silence plodded on, its steps in sync with the dull beats of his heart, the sheer strength of which pulsed in his tightly fisted hands. All that could have been said had already been said.

He realised on a logical level that he had answered unwisely soon, that a plethora of heretofore unheeded details would slowly unfold itself before his eyes with every day to come until the point when it became pretty much meaningless, but the full weight of the situation just couldn't settle in. His legs were steady, his responses normal, and in a way, the immediate understanding of how extremely things would change, how big of a shock it would be to their small community, escaped him without ever leaving so much as a trail he could follow. He imagined it would only truly descend on him bare moments before the supposed time, and his last minutes as a leader would be overcome with all sorts of inappropriate emotions.

He supposed he was putting a little too much faith in the dukes' intention to uphold their promise, but in the end, whether they did or not was not half as consequential as the fact that a word had indeed been given and a document signed, and that would give the queen a very convenient piece of leverage to use if the nobles were to bare their fangs in the Underground's direction ever again, even if another serial killer was to target their necks. The conditions of the Methuselah's return were, by all means, the best they could have hoped for, and the Gutter turning himself in hardly a few days after their departure – out of guilt for driving his family out, Virgil guessed, though he couldn't be sure – had most likely played a role. Still, one month was too long a time to wallow in obtuseness, and too long to hold one's ground amidst the abundance of psychologically demanding meetings: he knew firsthand how bad the pressure could get and couldn't help but be grateful for the queen's perseverance. He didn't fault her for certain nuances of the outcome. Not yet, at least. It wasn't unheard of in history for people in his position to forfeit logical thinking.

A lot would have to be done and arranged properly, in terms of the ghetto's future management, but most of that could wait until their return home. Until then, he would fool himself into thinking that everything was all right, indulge in long-since-forsaken naivety and evade the cognitive dissonance of reality and the empty spot where realisation should have been. He was afraid to realise, though. He wasn't fearless, wasn't even brave, he would only be terrified if his did. When he did.

And terror wasn't a face he wanted anyone to see on him.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

Londinium met them with a cheery grey drizzle and a curt invitation to attend an 'urgent' meeting at the palace as soon as it became prudent, which meant it could safely be delayed until the morning, and then the Underground erupted into a chaotic whirlwind of settling back in. Virgil went and sequestered himself in his office, leaving his woefully inexperienced sister to oversee the whole business with as little as "I trust you not to destroy what there is of order right now," and she fumed and ignored the weirdness of his behaviour. Her job, contrary to the insecurity born from its suddenness, boiled down to simple observation: the place really did run itself with very little input required when in familiar surroundings, and as machine after machine was powered back up and inspected and tested, she wondered if the worst of leading this place was brushing shoulders with the snobs above. The machinery was easy work and nothing to complain about.

On the people's faces, though, along with the relief of being home, was thinly spread a certain displeasure, as if the grimy metal overhead wasn't what they had been seeing the whole of their adult lives. It was illogical, as much as Vanessa ever bothered with logic. But in a way, natural too. You didn't spend a month under the sun, however weak and filtered, and then be happy about being stuck under the ground again for heaven knew how long.

Maybe, coming back wasn't such a good thing.

When the time neared early morning and everything had finally calmed a bit, her brother deigned to show his face at last, a little weary in the way they all were, but still unable to catch some rest thanks to that bloody summons. Like there was nothing better to pass the time than to cater to the Terrans' whims. She caught up to him as he was heading for the river exit, the one almost never used because of all the glitches in the system. Curious, his choice.

"You going to clock in at the palace?"

He stopped and turned only halfway to her, sighing with something like resignation – had he been hoping to run off under the radar? Why would he do that, that sleazy git?

"I shouldn't be long."

"Can I go with?"

She felt like she should. She'd been tailing him a fair bit this last month when there was something to do with their people, and he hadn't hesitated to explain the things she didn't understand, had never tried to drive her away with some inane excuse, why start now? From the look he was giving her, he knew she was bored, in addition to other reasons, but the exasperation was very soft, almost too much so to be casual. He smiled, and that was soft too. The wrung-out kind of soft.

"As long as you wait in the hall."

She blinked – that defeated half the purpose, - but readily took something over nothing. And here she'd actually wanted to face off those geezers and take note of how her brother kept them off his neck. This whole 'tailing' business was for the sake of learning how things usually went and where they could go better, and that, in its turn, would let her lend him a hand if something made him stumble. This sort of sentiment was partly what had driven her to take up medicine, but far more intimate this time around, as embarrassing as that sounded. Virgil was precious in his own right, every little bit of him that made him who he was; without, say, his kindness – as it was, she still remembered distantly a time when he'd been kind of prickly and rough around the edges – or his leadership, closely as it had woven itself around him like some sort of clawed vine, he wouldn't be quite the same.

She'd love him anyway.

Outside, if a bit lighter, was the same drizzly greyness as the last evening; it cut back the UV, but the miniscule droplets were cold like a frog's skin and kept crawling into her clothes. Virgil, ever the gentleman, offered his cloak. She called him a fool, because she sure as hell wasn't standing in for him if he came down with some disgusting bug, what with all the water they were basically breathing. She couldn't shoulder that much yet, and the rain was letting up in any case.

She should invest in an umbrella.

The palace halls were abuzz with discussion and loitering of a startling number of people, hardly enough to constitute a crowd, but worlds away from how anyone whose path was accidentally crossed would scurry away like escaping the plague whenever she and Virgil appeared for yet another of those pointless morning meetings that had been so frequent before the Empire had gotten involved. Virgil had explained that those were, for the most part, a demonstration of power, but even while the dukes could play around with their 'power' by summoning the Methuselah leader regardless of his opinion, the Terrans' leading emotion had been in between disgust, hate and fear. Now, though, it was more along the lines of evaluation and cold condescension, and they whispered among each other, instinctively herding themselves into small groups, followed the 'vampires' with those intolerable looks and cleared hesitantly from their path. Hadn't the dukes been trying to keep the Gutter business quiet? Vanessa couldn't be gladder that the waiting room was as empty as it was vast, never mind the guards. Her patience could only stretch so far.

Compared, however, to what could have happened under the same circumstances a couple of years ago – probably nothing short of a bloodbath, - she was surprisingly calm, the 'calm' only being used for scale. She must have changed somewhere along the way, but she wasn't one for soul-searching, she knew that much; Virgil would know, though, he was attentive to all sorts of details like that, had always been.

She still felt out of place in this bloody opulence.

At the sound of needle-sharp footsteps approaching at a business pace she cast a look at the doors, and kept watching from the corner of her eye as Colonel Spencer beelined to the doors Virgil had disappeared behind. Even under all the greyness streaming through the enormous windows on both side of Vanessa's claimed sofa, the colonel looked vivid enough to fit right in with all the colours of the decor, her flaming hair alone doing more than half the job. That woman looked like she belonged where she was, and the confidence of her soldier posture was only partly to blame.

Vanessa herself was more like a blotch of black ink on the luxurious cushions, a stain on the immaculate palace interior, alien enough to make the passing woman stop and look.

That look, though, so clear compared to the usual carefully schooled polite stoicism, was, strangely enough, one of pity.

Vanessa frowned in confusion. Whatever was going on here, it felt like she was just about the only one out of the loop, not to mention that she wouldn't take being _pitied _even from Virgil. Mary's unexplainable expression didn't last long, though, and then the puzzlement now mirroring Vanessa's own was swept away in a brief epiphany that melted rapidly into some sadness-like thing. And then her face locked up again and she marched away to her destination with only a mite less mettle in her puncturingly sharp steps.

The rain kept pelting the windows.

Vanessa remained confused, even when Virgil was let out of the accursed meeting chamber and they walked back through the same palace filled with the same mumbling nobility. Her brother was behaving strangely: he barely seemed to recognise she was there at all and strode on as if on autopilot, submerged so deeply within his thoughts that words didn't seem to reach. Confusion evolved into worry, steadily adding to the urgent need to know what the heck was going on.

"Miss Walsh."

She stopped and turned to look, trying to rein in her annoyance; she had too much on her mind to bear with pointless yapping and stay polite at the same time, new as the latter was to her and all. Virgil was walking away, none the wiser to her presence than a minute ago, and though she was awfully loath to be left behind among all these Terran noble shits, there was little hope that he'd hear even if she yelled. She pinned the Terran with an irate stare. Maybe he'll get the hint.

"Don't be so cross, please. It doesn't suit such a beautiful face," the man spoke, words flowing like water despite his obvious unease. "I suppose we will be seeing a lot more of you now that your brother will not be able to attend, and it only seemed prudent of me to acquaint ourselves sooner rather than later."

The compliment-induced blush didn't last more than a scarce second.

"Why would my brother stop coming here...?"

Something was wrong. This commotion, Colonel Spencer, her brother's state.

Very, very wrong.

"Oh! You haven't heard," the Terran has the same epiphany moment as Spencer flashing across his face, but then that charming polite smile takes its place back, and his expression is one of make-believe indifference to telling what must be the juiciest piece of gossip at the court today. "Why, the Count of Manchester is to be executed tomorrow morning. My condolences."

She doesn't notice that there's not a trace of them on his face. She doesn't care if that disgusting polite smile is sincere or not.

She feels cold. A sensationless, sourceless kind of cold that rests in and below her skin. Somewhere in her head, she knows it's just a biological response to stress, a narrowing of blood vessels. The thought passes unheeded. It doesn't matter, after all. It doesn't matter that running in the palace halls is undignified as all hell. It doesn't matter that the people she passes look at her like she's gone mad. It matters that the exit was only one door away.

It matters that she finds Virgil and sees with her own eyes and hears with her own ears, because her mind is whispering "He is as good as dead, thus, he is already dead" in derailed circles and it's _lying _and she can't even trust her own mind right now.

It's raining buckets outside, and she's drenched to the bone in seconds, but she sees his back

"Virgil!"

and doesn't stop until he is but a few metres away, and he hasn't even put his hood up, and he's _smiling_, he's fucking _smiling _at her –

- but it's such a sad, wrung-out thing that she can't bear to look at it while her mind goes in frenetic loops around the word "execution".

She doesn't really know what face she's making right now, but it must be a telling one. She was easy to read, so he'd said once. He knows that she knows.

Why is it so bloody difficult to put her thoughts in order when there's that stupid magnetic "execution" in her head?

"Since when have you known?" she asks, and she needs to know that as much as she needs to breath.

Because if it has all been a trap from the start, she'll thrash the fucking palace and bury those noble fucktards under its remains after skinning them all alive, and she'd like to see someone try and stop her.

"Her Majesty contacted me back in the Empire. It was a condition for allowing our return and ensuring a degree of future safety."

It takes her some time to process the words, because she refuses to understand what it means.

There was a choice. There was a fucking _choice_.

"Are you nuts?!"

She'd been cold not a few minutes ago – well, now she's not. Because it's rage and exasperation and disbelief and powerlessness and all that angry energy that needs an outlet and keeps raising an aimless, uncontrolled storm.

But he keeps watching her, sad and solemn and apologetic, and it's so in the open in a way she hadn't seen for a very long time, and that enraged fire burns itself out so swiftly, flickers out like a feeble candle, returning to her skin the sensation of heavy, large and heatless droplets.

She's suddenly too tired to stay angry.

The understanding hits in full.

This time tomorrow, there'll be no Virgil. No family, no companionship, no intimacy and unconditional trust to whose existence she hadn't paid any notice. A vast barren with ghosts of memories tapping on her shoulders and nothing to hold onto for centuries to come. And every day she'll look in the mirror and see a shadow of his face in her own and feel that emptiness try to purge her from her place. The place where he won't be standing anymore.

She doesn't want to be alone in that emptiness with no way out.

She's scared. A world without Virgil, with only herself to depend on, is scary.

And like any scared child – because she's never bothered to grow up, apparently, and there are no adults in this world anyway, - she wants to cry.

She realises numbly that she's been crying for some time now.

She doesn't want him to see her cry, to see her so weak, even though it had always been his privilege. She can't be weak right now, she absolutely cannot, and so she squeezes her eyes until the spots under her eyelids blind her and holds her breath, trying to not let a single sob escape, and her tear ducts burn with a thousand spikes until she wants nothing but to scream, and everything inside her head is an endless chorus of _why, why, why_ and _the time's running out, have to do something_; she can't just stay still, there must be something, _something, anything..._

In blind trust, with her eyes still screwed shut, she makes half a shaky step forward, and he's there, having covered those metres in a heartbeat – _his heart won't be beating, - _the hands catching her shuddering shoulders steady as if nothing is wrong in this world. Only his grip is a bit too strong.

She rests her forehead on his cold, soaked shoulder to pacify the need to curl into herself, but underneath the cloak and the jacket, his vest is dry, and she grabs the lapels to warm her fingers and to have something to hold onto in case something tries to tear her away.

He is the only source of warmth in this grey, sopping as a marsh and revoltingly heatless world.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

At some point after they return underground, Vanessa disappears in a distant nook of the far-reaching metal-strewn anthill that they call home without so much as a sound, and Virgil finds himself wondering; he can almost guess where she's gone to, but there is no time to look or to muse about why she would detach herself from his side _now_ – she's never cared enough about dignity to try and give him the space he's supposed to need, but they are – he would very much like it if they were – family before everything else, and though he knows she must have her reasons, he just can't see them, and that, that hurts, which is largely improper. Most even remotely strong emotions are improper, but _now_, he can't find it in himself to care.

_Now, _the documents legalising her ascent to his position need polishing, until not a single word can be used against her. He has to make sure it won't, one of the last things he can give her. There isn't time left for much else.

He hadn't held out until minutes pre-execution, as he'd hoped, without letting the imminent collapse of his world cloud his mind: giving into something as undignified as panic would only hinder the implementation of a number of preparations that must be completed before there is no longer any time left. What has seized him isn't quite panic, thankfully; it is more of a pressing, hysterical urgency of having a frighteningly close deadline – quite a literal one, that – set in stone and a vaguely excessive amount of work to do. And it isn't even all official work, either – he'd started on drafting his will and the other important papers back on the airship: the former was simple enough, but the legal position and title transfer and the paper independent of any other that basically put Vanessa on the same level of authority as him in the matters concerning the ghetto and its people – the one he'd been thinking of writing up even before it became so urgently necessary – are both rather voluminous while requiring copious amounts of proofreading. He can't thank his assistants enough.

Only a chosen few know about the _situation_, and those who do only refer to it among themselves, hiding from his ears, as _tragedy_. Most of the time, though, they don't refer to it at all. They let a bitter silence hang in its stead.

He can't really think about how to tell the people, and finds himself doubting if they should even be told prior to the event. For some part, it is surely nothing but a selfish fear of facing so many reactions to a thing that he's been obstinately trying to distance himself from, but another part of him wishes with all the force of a decades-old belief not to raise a fuss, and over something so personal no less: after all, he _is _taking care of who will succeed him at this very moment, and no harm from the government is going to impose on his people with his death. Vanessa's going to do well, he can just see it; certainly better than his pathetic, past-obsessed and weak-minded self. She is more ready for it than he was in his time, even without taking into consideration the fates of both the former and the soon-to-be-former leaders. Then again, neither he nor his sister hold an excessive amount of fondness from the previous Lord Walsh.

He knows that it's a useless hope, but he hopes anyway that his going won't be too hard on her.

If only there was something he could do to make it easier, but his mind is unhelpful and beleaguered with many other things, and despite the fact that her feelings are generally an open book to him, few suggestion of practical sense are coming up. It strikes him to try putting himself in her place, but he aborts the idea in literal seconds: the thought of losing the sister he'd grown up together with, in such a rapid manner too, makes him vaguely nauseous with terror and forces his whole torso to tremble, vivid as this empathy fit is. He absolutely cannot stand the possibility, and something in him churns extremely uncomfortably with the knowledge that all his affections that he cannot possibly verbalize – grace of his blatant inability to do so and his rearing-up pride and the damned propriety and many other things – will now never be known to their full extent. There is just too little time left. And in the face of death, the issue seems infinitely important.

Astounding what realisation of one's mortality does to one's priorities.

That night, Vanessa shows up at his bedroom door with a pillow secured in her grasp like a favourite rag doll, the traces of anger at the unfair world not quite yet gone from her eyes and not a sound, not even a knock or a quiet thudding of bare feet, so tired her steps, to drown out the clock that loudly mocks him for his remaining time; her pillow goes unused as she curls into his, and he strokes her hair until she falls into pretend-sleep, and feels guilty for not quite knowing if he is only comforting her to distract himself from his own doom, and counts her breaths, and sleep just doesn't come, and she keeps his free hand in a grip that can break his composure into smithereens any moment. He is supposed to protect her. He wants to protect her. But _he himself _is the source of her distress this time, and it's not like that snowy March night, and he _cannot do a fucking thing_, cannot even hug her because it might well deal the finishing blow to that carefully masked frostweb of cracks, and he suspects that he just might shatter as well. He cannot be weak in front of her now. He won't show a need for someone's strength when she barely has enough for herself, and she'll need all of it later on. His trials will be over soon enough.

Everything, including this unidentifiable sort of closeness they now share, will be over soon enough.

If all this, if making them grow so dear to each other with hardly a month given to do something about it – and if not for this impending end, he wouldn't even have _thought_ to do something about it, - was fate's idea of a joke, it was the cruellest one he's ever heard.

When he slips into a shallow, disorienting daze, he dreams of himself weaving a crown of frostbitten, wilting white roses into her hair, the wilful tresses the only thing holding the stems together, while leaving the thorns on, and blood rolls off his fingertips and down her cheeks like tears and smells like tart wine.

He regrets ardently, with all he has, leaving his main burden, this thorny crown of dying flowers so gorgeous even in their decay, on her head. He wishes just as vehemently that someone else could bear this burden. But that's the best choice that he could've made with the time allotted – too little time, never enough time, - and his bloody leadership and its attendant responsibilities still come before everything else.

He hates it stronger than anything else.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

He doesn't want her to see it.

That's what he tells her when it's time for him to leave and she's yelled at him for skipping the announcement. It wasn't even a conflict of beliefs of any kind, like the ones they'd shared plenty of before that mess with Bridgett's death, just a knee-jerk reaction to somebody doing an exceedingly stupid, by her standards, thing, but she is aware that she's in no position to judge him right now, and that awareness runs deep. No matter, she'll be telling the folks herself.

He tells her that, and it really, really shouldn't feel as sincere as it does. Maybe she's blind. Maybe she's a horrible, self-centred creature that has trouble seeing past her own nose. Maybe it's just that he thinks too much.

They've tried talking. It didn't exactly work out: she couldn't really come up with anything that wouldn't be a scathing jibe hitting too close to home, and whatever he wanted to say – and even she could see there was a lot, - nothing ever made it out. All that turmoil stayed solid on his face, kept at bay by some force of reason. Neither of them are particularly experienced with talking about feelings, of all things, and it's beyond her why such silliness seems important. 'Feelings' is something she stashes together with 'Breathtaking romance' and 'Overdramatic teenagers' under the tag 'Stupidly mushy' by an incredible leap of generalisation, something they were taught to ignore in favour of logical thinking, him more so than her, something he, as a diligent student, always puts after the well-being of this stinking anthill he calls home.

Only for all their antics, they still feel things. Mushy things even. Silly things. Out-of-place, weird, unlabeled things. Things that refuse to be made into words and grow and spread until it hurts to keep them bottled.

It has to be said now, and good thing she's bold enough for both of them.

"I love you, brother," quietly, quietly, the last note of a lullaby ringing out clearly in the silence, that's the best she can do, and she tries to smile. Words for her sake, a smile for his. It tastes strange, this unfamiliar smile.

He looks at her like she's just raised the sun.

The things they leave unvoiced are going to forever stay that way. She knows that; even something as brash as 'I love you' feels grossly inadequate. Like bubbles in water, some obscure ideas of a proper wording will keep rising to the surface and popping pathetically to reveal their emptiness. The seas inside will churn and rage and birth foam – millions, billions of bubbles, and none will hold that sea within themselves. Their only hope is to show it, bit by bit, through actions big and small and words that have absolutely nothing to do with what they're unleashing, and only then a full lifetime might be enough.

There's no time left, though.

A nobleman late for his own execution, can you imagine the scandal?

His face melts into warmth and miraculous understanding and a vague undercurrent of pain, and he steps closer and hesitantly, innocently, but still so very urgently presses his lips to hers.

There's no passion or romance or spark or anything like that, it's almost an empty gesture, but so very meaningful at the same time; it's like water draining from an overflowing sink, the relief of pressure and weight once a way has been opened, and it's so, so warm, the kind of warmth that spelled out 'safe' in capitals, and it's not really what siblings do, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and when words fail, that's all they can do to get that stifling affection across before it's too late, and he's saying goodbye like this-

He's saying goodbye.

It's like panic, as if an avalanche she hasn't really been trying to escape finally hits, and its weight settles abruptly around her ribcage in a steel loop, and it feels like a tight glove has been pulled over her heart, with a thick needle pushed through the middle for good measure; he's comforting her when it's his time to die that's nearing, and now there's guilt, too, adding another layer of stifling rubber that keeps constricting and hurting-

Inside her head, throat silently contorting, she screams.

Her lips slide across his cheek as she throws herself forward, arms winding around his neck with desperate strength she can barely control, and she finally recognizes this galestorm fear for what it is – the fear for him, and her looming solitude can't matter less right now because he's going to die-

He can't. He can't die. He just can't.

His cheek presses against her head, and the arms that settle around her back are nothing if not steadying.

He won't die. Not on her watch. Not like this, condemned by those worms for the tomfoolery of one deranged man.

She has never been fond of sitting on her hands, after all.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

It could only be for the purpose of some sick, large-scale irony that the morning sky, with the champagne-like dawn haze melting behind the buildings, was so idyllically clear, probably the same irony that was weaved through this entire situation; a death god's apathetic mockery. The thought, though, that the world was seeing him off with a smile, much the same as the one Vanessa had given him earlier, was substantially more comforting, promising peace and a reprieve from endlessly butting heads with the Albion nobles, at the very least, and the familiarity of the streets he was walking along gave life to an illusion of normalcy. He focused on that. Rehashing his regrets at this point would not do him any good.

They barged in regardless, unbidden reminders of what he was leaving on his inexperienced, short-tempered sister's shoulders, of the storms her immature guidance could steer their people into. But no, it was too late to contemplate an endless variety of 'what if's; that was, for all intents and purposes, a discommodingly useless pastime as of now. With a well-practised mental shove, he pushed the irrational notions aside.

Speaking of irrational, it only now occurred to him that he'd been commended with a staggering degree of trust: he hadn't been put under lock upon arrival, as he thought his visit to the palace could have turned out, and neither had there been an armed escort waiting for him at the Underground gate this morning. It was not improbable that Her Majesty, in her best pacifistic fashion, was the one behind this nuance, offering a rather blatant and, frankly, unusable opportunity to escape. In the occasion that he chose not to attend, the Underground would be awash with its inhabitants' blood by night-time, to speak figuratively, not to mention that such dishonourable conduct was simply out of question. He'd lost the fight, and he would accept the outcome with a straight back; surely Her Majesty was aware of that.

The last tribute it was, then, a liberty to retain at least a semblance of dignity when there was not a single law, nor a precedent to justify what the dukes were gladly accomplishing. He imagined, however, that the results of that accomplishment would not fail to disappoint: after all, Vanessa was just as stubborn as him, if not even more so, and would not cut them any slack. Their only achievement would be carried-out revenge for a failed assassination attempt, and a flaunting of power, and that, as far as his ideas went, served no practical purpose.

He didn't see why he had to die, and that unsettled him more than he'd like to admit.

He felt vaguely nauseous.

At least there wasn't an audience in the form of a grumbling mob, which could well have been the case, had he been publicly tried for high treason, the only solid pretext for decapitation to date; he supposed he could thank the early hour and the lack of a notice in the press, both of which had, obviously, been deliberately planned for – his death would be a message not to the general populace, but to a very specific group, and there was little need for a demonstrative act. There was hardly a dozen officials in attendance: a few witnesses and police officers, a coroner tasked with pronouncing the result of this ordeal, and a massive, hooded figure leaning on a proportionally large axe. None of them uttered a sound upon his arrival, only gave him tense, meaningful looks, but it was a far cry from an eerie silence that would have befitted this kind of scene – only the birds were straining their throats, giving nothing short of a full-scale opera performance, and, overlaid with the blood soon to leave its mark on Tower Hill, the sounds felt all the more surreal. Inhale. Exhale. No regrets. If he could just maintain that thought for a minute, everything would be fine.

He succumbed when an officer was ordered to tie his hands. It was soon now.

Inhale. Exhale.

His mind ran hysterical analogies between the scaffold and a stage. He tried not look at it. Anywhere else would do. He raised his eyes to the buildings-obscured horizon alit with the dawn's blaze.

On the mansard roof of one of the houses, barely visible through the growing glow, a person stood tall.

The perplexing sight tore his thoughts from anything and everything pertaining to executions faster than he could blink; it didn't even strike him as odd that nobody bothered to snap him out of his confusion and get on with the proceedings. This development was much too sudden and bizarre for his grip on reality to remain firm. He stared on.

And then the figure spoke, in a loud, no-nonsense tone he knew all too well, and he couldn't decide whether to groan with incredulousness or give into a fit of tired hysterical laughter. Much too puzzled with countless 'why's, he did neither.

"Attention, please!"

As if she didn't already have all eyes on herself. Heavens, that woman; sometimes, almost more often than he was comfortable with, he could hardly believe she was his sister.

"Just to confirm, you _do _know that according to all those documents you signed just yesterday, your go-ahead for going through with this farce is the presence of us Methuselah within the borders of this kingdom, right?"

He hadn't noticed before that she could use such an authoritative voice when she so wanted, if she was even doing that consciously. Such a tendency had avoided his attention during their stay in the Empire, but for all its novelty, the trick worked well enough to warrant not an order to capture, but an actual response, however automatic and lightweight meaning-wise.

"What of it?" one of the officials barked back, slightly nervous if that defensive hue to his voice was any indication. Perhaps he was catching on to some implications Virgil was missing; perhaps Virgil wasn't really missing them, but consciously denied their existence. After all, there was no way he could have predicted this naive, fairy-tale insanity, and his mind was still struggling to think outside his admittedly short-lived resolve to die peacefully. This was such an incredibly childish, ignorant act on her part, there was no way it was going to work without some divine intervention, the rational portion of his mind supplied resignedly still. He rather agreed with that.

"In other words, if we're not here, you've got no excuse to do away with brother dearest over there," she confirmed, looking and sounding positively smug; in the following silence, he could hear the faint, but familiar hum of an airship's propellers, and it finally dawned on him just where she'd been gone to early that night. All the men around him, except one, met with such insolence-bordering brashness, were doing a worthy imitation of out-of-water fish. Virgil just wanted to hide his face.

"Well, you're here now, are you not?" the one not wavering between bewilderment and outrage called out, accusing and anticipatory all at once, and as the attendant officers followed the man's command, aimed their rifled at Vanessa and got a dozen of those trained on themselves in return, some stubborn part of Virgil was protesting that he'd come here to ensure the Underground's future, not get caught in a mess of a rescue that was bound to leave not even ripples, but waves roaring across the political arena – waves he wanted no part of. Another major emotion, strangely enough, was gladness at such mass intervention, by the ghetto's standard: all that firepower couldn't have come solely from his sister's former 'gang', for lack of a better word. All that, after he'd spend the last several decades deliberately making himself unknown and invisible to both the Albion top brass and his brethren so that they could have the peace they unconditionally deserved, after he'd convinced himself of his uselessness when confronted with his father's legacy in the form of the finely calibrated administrative system that only seldom needed oiling and had only broken down once, after he'd failed to resort to brute force when needed and almost doomed them all as a result and couldn't live up to his own expectations that might even not have really been his. All that, and they'd still come to this mad parody of a rescue operation which was holding on the dumbest luck he'd ever witnessed. They thought him worth standing up for, because Vanessa's word had its limits, and no amounts of persuasion would have worked if there was nothing to build upon.

He supposed loyalty went both ways sometimes.

And as the airship bearing the Imperial crest crawled across the sky, as Vanessa stood there, warrior-like and triumphant, grinning a winner's unrestrained grin, white-gold sunlight ricocheting harmlessly off of her white-gold crown, the sun was rising.

Virgil smiled.

Whatever will be, will be.

ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ

_A lot of time has flowed by since then, those long restless months little but vague recollections of a whimsical strife. Londinium still stands unchanged, gargoyles making faces at the citizens from the walls of the Westminster Abbey in judgemental mockery, and the Buckingham palace is as much the Queen's sacred abode as it has always been. She herself has gained a strong hand against the opposing nobility grace of what used to be called the ghetto, and though the occasion of its inhabitants' final departure inevitably revives a bitter taste in her memory, she recalls with hidden fondness the scant years that the two members of the former House of Manchester had spent in her service. The only known manifestation of those sentiments is a bed of white roses planted as per Queen Esther's orders in a covert sun-bathed nook of the palace gardens. The gardeners tell that those roses bloom with spectacular majesty, and as the rumour goes, at some point in early August, on one of the bushes appears an elusive blossom of unprecedented splendour; it is shielded carefully from prying hands, entwined in a tangle of clawed branches, and in that protective cage it thrives, until it disappears with no trace or witness, on the very peak of its beauty, before even a hint of decay touches the velveteen petals, and only a memory is left if the former resplendence._

_._

_._

_._

_June – September 2014_


	7. Afterword

Yes, I actually finished this back in September. And I put off uploading until _January next year_. Uni is the ultimate enemy of free time, so sue me.

And then, there's editing. Lots of editing. And it's not even about displeasure with some specific parts or chapters, though there was a bit of that, or writer's block, 'cos I haul that thing along with me all the time - it's why it takes me so long to actually write stuff instead of just thinking it up. If I was capable of writing out every plot bunny that's ever attacked my poor head, my overall word count would've been well into millions by now, but alas, I don't even dream of that kind of productivity. So. 30K in about 3 months of absolute freedom aka summer vacation. And then half a year of snail-paced typing and editing, because I'm an old-fashioned crone who likes the sight of pencil words crammed into tiny lines on real paper, and because my time's not really mine. But back on topic.

The thing is, I suck at communication big time. I've learned to keep my mouth shut - the reason I rarely answer to reviews is so that I don't put my foot in my mouth when people are actually spending their time reviewing my stuff, - but leaving my stories to collect electronic dust on my computer is something I don't feel very comfortable with doing, especially since my writing is one of the few things I get complimented on. The stories with which I'm trying to tell something are a special kind, but, as we've already established, telling things so that they are understood for what they are is not my master skill. Thus, I worry, and do the following things. No. 1, I ask that you review, and, if possible, put in there how _you _understood the story; that would be of great help to my still budding plot-building skills (oh, and how did all those metaphors feel?). And of course, anything else you wish to say would be much appreciated. If you would be kind enough to think about that before reading on, because the No. 2 thing I'm going to do is try to explain and clear up some things that I feel could have been misinterpreted.

I'm still unclear on what the general society thinks about incest in fiction - the general response seems to be 'yuck', but there is certainly a few who appreciate that sort of thing as well, so I feel like I need to say something on this point. I think I've made it clear that ultimately, if we all agree that incest is based upon sexual desire and chemistry, Virgil and Vanessa's relationship by the end isn't incest, whatever it might seem like because of that kiss - peck, really - and a slew off other small things. For one, I was going mostly blind there - I'm an only child, and no one had ever really bothered to share their sibling experiences with me beyond the classic "They're annoying as crap" stuff, but that's less than half my point. The more important part is, lines kind of tend to blur when you grow really close to someone and begin to really value their presence in your life (there was that 'time limit' thing going too). I did my best to put those feelings into the story, because I find that words fail me when I try for an abstract description - it is a form of love, surely, but we all know there are different types of it, and actually describing them would be quite the feat; one I can't pull off. I had toyed with the idea of incest, actually, but decided against it in the end - to most people's relief, I should guess. I just couldn't find much appreciation for something as primitive as reproduction-aimed hormones messing with the kind of interpersonal connection that I had an image of - and yes, I'm aware that all emotions are regulated by hormones. Memories, however, aren't (as far as my knowledge goes), and that was what I wanted to build upon; and they're twins, to boot, although I tried to point out as early as chapter 1 the fact that they grew up together is more important than the shared blood. Hence, the probably ridiculous amount of backstory (which also worked for character study, think chapter 2 and the deal with the former Lord Walsh - I love that a little too much for my own good).

Not the several-month time skips between the chapters, though. That was just my whim and something of tone-setting *grins*, although it works out not half bad to give it all some time to settle and whatnot. I don't think I managed to make those stretches of time very feel-able (goodness, what a word. Cue shudders of horror. My vocabulary's hopeless), but intense, action-packed plots have never really been my best point.

Speaking about the Walsh dad, I'm afraid it might have gotten away from me at some point, to the extent that I now have a whole tale full of drama and angst about the previous Walsh generation collecting dust in my head. If what I gave you in chapter 2 feels overloaded with unnecessary information that doesn't make a drop of sense even when you've made it to the very end, that's why. Sorry I'm not sorry; that tends to happen sometimes, and I can't say I'm fully dissatisfied that it does. It's simply more interesting for me this way.

Random fact about WRG: it started with chapter 3. Of course, what I had in mind at first is pretty different from the end result - the original idea (thankfully, never written out) had Vanessa cutting her hair in a rebellious fit and Ion or Astha doing some part-time counselling. The chapter ended up not very brilliant anyway, almost a filler as it seems to me, but silly sentiment got in my way - the very first chapter, duh. I couldn't bear to remove it altogether and patched it up a bit, though I'm not completely happy with the result: I have a feeling my clothes-focused girlish part took over when writing Vanessa's POV there, not a fact I'm proud of, but, well... I hope it made you smile, at least. And then there's the thing that the shit from chapter 4 would've hit the fan a bit too early in the story for my liking and the climax would have hit the wrong point in time. So - stalling. Forgive me for that unjustifiable sin *laughs*.

When I really think about it, chapter 5 seems kind of plotless too, but the point was to show that Byzantium, and the Empire by affiliation, wouldn't become a new 'home' for them, at least at that point. The idea still holds in chapter 6, actually - they're not going to magically find their place in a completely different country, is what I was trying to say there. It's a matter of perspective, largely - Vanessa doesn't really think of the Underground as 'home', can't after Albion allowed for her brother to get sentenced to death, unlike Virgil, who feels responsible for his people, who are, in his mind, one and the same with the Underground as a location. He only learns to separate the two when he's rescued (such a damsel in distress *grins*). And what happens from there on, I'll leave to your imagination. By the way, do you remember what I said in the first scene of chapter 6 about why the empress was so eager to keep them *winks*? That's a hint. But I won't mind if you choose to ignore it, really.

If it's unclear, which I'm pretty certain it is, it was Vanessa who'd called the Imperial airship over. Naturally, there was a whole deal of plotting involved - sneaking into the palace, getting Esther to help, actually making the call, all that stuff, - but you can think whatever you want, really; the means don't matter nearly as much in this case as the result. I left it out because put before the execution scene, it would've been a spoiler like no other, and put after it, it would've destroyed the flow completely. Think of this whole point as an element of mystery/suspense.

Speaking of chapter 6, it's kind of bugging me after I've let it stew for some months - the 'I don't like how it turned out' kind of bugging. The second half feels kind of overly dramatic when I take a really detached look at it, detached as in completely separate from the previous five chapters. I dunno. Maybe it's just that artist syndrome when you start hating your own work the more time passes. Maybe I've just grown a bit as an author and I'm picking up on some shit I overlooked earlier. Hell if I know. It feels incesty when that's not the point at all, but figuring out a completely different way of showing the bond between those two feels like too much trouble too, especially now that my passion for the TB series has mostly burned out. _And _there's that lame 'character death averted' hand that I pulled. So I say "Screw it" and go with what I have and hope it does the trick. Just saying that if you think the second half of chapter 6 sucks, I'm probably aware of that. Also, I kinda feel like Virgil turned out too girly. Like I said, too much drama. Insert curse here. I really can't help not knowing how men think, I'm not one, and figuring it out from what research I know of is so _damn __complicated_, I've given up long ago. So, yeah, I might have screwed up that as well. But enough of self-deprecation.

Random fact no. 2 that could make some people tick (beware): there's a couple of songs I associate with certain places in certain chapters when I hear them. Not many - only three, really, and they're both in Japanese, but you don't have to understand the words, and it might even be better if you don't; it's all about the mood anyway. The first goes with the last part of 'Virgil's breakdown on the airship' scene in chapter 4; it's "Starlog" by Choucho, and it's the chorus only (don't mind that it's the opening theme for a mahou-shoujo show; yeah, I was listening to way too much Jpop that summer, don't sue me). The second could go with the whole chapter 5, but it's best for the very end, for which the sounds of rain are not the last reason; it's called "Magnolia" by Chouchou (!a different artist!). Finally, chapter 6 and its blasted second-to-last scene, not counting the italicized epiloguish part: Bump of Chicken - Amedama no Uta ("Candy song" or something like that. The name's kind of misleading). Actually, I'd really like it if you looked up the lyrics for this one, or rather, that couple of lines with the heart-wrenching vocals; in fact, that's about the only part that matters. So, yeah, for those of you who were curious, there you go.

I think that covers the most important matters. There's a number of other things that I could address, but really, that would take entirely too much space; I might update this if someone asks a question I'd like to be explained to everyone reading, or if a question is asked repeatedly.

With the most sincere hope for your enjoyment and wishes of the best of luck,

Chartis.


End file.
